When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the United Nations on September 29, he had a number of concerns on his mind, but one stood out above the rest. He feared that President Obama was downgrading the struggle against the Iranian nuclear program. “To defeat [the Islamic State] and leave Iran as a threshold nuclear power,” Netanyahu said in the most quotable line of his speech, “is to win the battle and lose the war.”

Netanyahu had good reason to sound the alarm. An examination of Obama’s recent moves in the Middle East reveals that he has exploited the U.S.-led military campaign against the Islamic State (IS) in order to increase cooperation with Iran in matters of regional security. Of course, administration officials dismiss any suggestion that they are “coordinating” with the Iranians militarily. In their next breath, however, they grudgingly concede otherwise—acknowledging, for example, that we provided advance notice to Tehran of the anti-IS coalition’s bombing plans in Syria. They also acknowledge opening “a quiet backchannel” to Tehran in order to “de-conflict” Iranian and American operations in Iraq.

Indeed, “de-conflict” is the favored euphemism of the moment. “No, we’re not going to coordinate,” Secretary of State Kerry said in reference to Iran’s client Bashar Assad and the military campaign against IS. “We will certainly want to de-conflict, . . . but we’re not going to coordinate.”

Too clever by half, this distinction is hardly lost on America’s traditional allies in the region, all of whom regard the Iranian alliance system, which includes Syria and Hizballah, as their primary enemy. Middle East media are replete with stories of backroom deals between Washington and Tehran. Given the enormous gap between what the Americans are claiming in public about Iran and what they are seen to be doing in private, even the false reports carry an air of plausibility.

Khamenei the Silent Partner

No less a personage than Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, recently joked about the hypocrisy. Emerging from a hospital stay for surgery, he said he’d amused himself during his convalescence by keeping track of the lies of American officials who, while disclaiming any appeals for Iranian assistance, were privately begging for help. Even John Kerry, he delighted in adding, had approached the Iranian foreign minister with cap in hand—the very same Kerry who had piously announced “in front of the whole world, ‘We will not request help from Iran.’”

According to Khamenei, Iran has rejected all of the American requests. But Tehran has indeed permitted operational coordination—sorry, “de-confliction”—with the United States. In effect, Khamenei has set Iran up as America’s silent partner in the Middle East, and Kerry himself, at a recent hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, testified to the value the administration places on this partnership. Grilled by Senator Marco Rubio about glaring deficiencies in the American strategy against IS, Kerry offered a stunning defense. “[Y]ou’re presuming that Iran and Syria don’t have any capacity to take on [IS],” he lectured Rubio. “If we are failing and failing miserably, who knows what choice they might make.”

Iran, in the administration’s view, should thus be seen as a force multiplier for the United States. This line of reasoning has a long history, as one can detect by reading between the lines of Leon Panetta’s new memoir, Worthy Fights. Panetta, who served Obama both as secretary of defense and director of the CIA, recounts how he and his colleagues on the National Security Council (NSC) fought with the president over the American endgame in Iraq. Urged by the NSC to reach an agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for American troops to remain in the country, the president refused. Why? Obama, Panetta explained in a recent interview, nursed “the hope that perhaps others in the world could step up to the plate and take on” the role of stabilizing Iraq.

Which others? Panetta did not specify, but Obama undoubtedly assumed that Iran, the obvious candidate, would see Iraqi stability as in its own self-interest. It was a severe miscalculation. The precipitous departure of the American forces, Panetta argues in his book, removed the United States as a bulwark against Shiite sectarianism and led ineluctably to the alienation of Iraq’s Sunnis—developments that (as Panetta omits to point out) took place under the sheltering umbrella of Iranian power.

Obama Alienating Regional Allies

Later, when civil war broke out in Syria, Obama’s policy was similarly deferential to Tehran, and with similar consequences. In 2012, he rejected another unanimous recommendation of the NSC: this time, to aid the Syrian rebels. It was the same advice he’d received from America’s allies in the Middle East, who grew ever more insistent as it became clear that Iranian intervention was giving Bashar Assad the upper hand. But Obama held his ground and, in doing so, effectively recognized Syria as an Iranian sphere of interest and hence inviolate.

Of course, Obama has never described his calculus in such terms. But he has hinted at it—by, for example, expressing his opposition to American participation in a Sunni-Shiite “proxy war,” which is nothing if not a synonym for a war against Iran.

Impolitic recent statements by Vice President Joseph Biden testify further to the astounding bias in the Obama administration against America’s traditional friends in the Middle East. Discussing the Syrian civil war, Biden developed at length the theme that “our biggest problem is our allies”—even as, on the ground in Syria, coalition military operations against IS are indirectly strengthening those allies’ enemies, starting with Assad. In the words of an American official quoted in the New York Times, “It would be silly for [Assad’s forces] not to take advantage of the U.S. doing airstrikes. . . . Essentially, we’ve allowed them to perform an economy of force. They don’t have to be focused all over the country, just on those who threaten their population centers.”

In the past, to assuage America’s allies who were angry at the pro-Iranian bias in U.S. policy, Obama pledged to build up the anti-Assad rebels in the Free Syrian Army (FSA). But he never really followed through on his pledge. Now he is playing the same tattered card in order to enhance the coalition against IS. But General John Allen, the commander of the coalition, has made the insincerity transparent by stating that training and equipping the FSA “could take years”—in other words, until after Obama has left office.

What would it take for Obama to change course? Here, Turkey has assumed the lead. If the American leader wants Turkey as a full-fledged ally, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has insisted, then he must agree to oust Syria’s Assad. This demand places Obama in a difficult bind. If he fails to gain Turkey as a true partner, the coalition against IS will be hollow at its core. But he has explicitly dedicated himself to avoiding the kind of large-scale war that Turkey requires of him.

More to the point, meeting Turkey’s demand would also entail scuttling the administration’s silent partnership with Iran in Syria—a move that Tehran, for its part, would not take sitting down and might counter by, for instance, bringing Israel under attack. Indeed, as Iran’s deputy foreign minister recently revealed, Tehran has directly warned that efforts by the U.S. or its allies to topple Bashar Assad would place Israel at risk. Hizballah’s October 7 attack on Israeli forces, its first declared such operation since 2006, proves the seriousness of the threat.

Nuclear Negotiations

And Iran has other means of retaliation as well, for instance by adopting an even more recalcitrant position in the current negotiations over its nuclear program. By all accounts, those negotiations are failing. With no agreement expected before November 24, the expiration date of last year’s interim deal, Khamenei can contemplate several possible courses of action. He might, for example, extend the interim deal in return for a reward in the form of further relief from sanctions. That would at least allow Obama to buy time. But what if Khamenei were instead to demand an even more exorbitant reward, or threaten to abandon negotiations altogether?

Either of those choices would deeply complicate Obama’s life, precisely at the moment when the war against IS grows ever more burdensome. Whatever Khamenei chooses, it is he, not Obama, who now holds the initiative.

In brief, our silent partnership with Tehran has simultaneously emboldened Tehran and other enemies and alienated our allies: the very same allies who are vital to subduing IS. In the meantime, that silent partnership not only has done nothing for us, it has considerably weakened our hand—and that of its main proponent, Barack Obama. Yet he shows no sign of considering alternative strategies. No wonder Netanyahu sounded the alarm in New York.

Authors

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the United Nations on September 29, he had a number of concerns on his mind, but one stood out above the rest. He feared that President Obama was downgrading the struggle against the Iranian nuclear program. “To defeat [the Islamic State] and leave Iran as a threshold nuclear power,” Netanyahu said in the most quotable line of his speech, “is to win the battle and lose the war.”

Netanyahu had good reason to sound the alarm. An examination of Obama’s recent moves in the Middle East reveals that he has exploited the U.S.-led military campaign against the Islamic State (IS) in order to increase cooperation with Iran in matters of regional security. Of course, administration officials dismiss any suggestion that they are “coordinating” with the Iranians militarily. In their next breath, however, they grudgingly concede otherwise—acknowledging, for example, that we provided advance notice to Tehran of the anti-IS coalition’s bombing plans in Syria. They also acknowledge opening “a quiet backchannel” to Tehran in order to “de-conflict” Iranian and American operations in Iraq.

Indeed, “de-conflict” is the favored euphemism of the moment. “No, we’re not going to coordinate,” Secretary of State Kerry said in reference to Iran’s client Bashar Assad and the military campaign against IS. “We will certainly want to de-conflict, . . . but we’re not going to coordinate.”

Too clever by half, this distinction is hardly lost on America’s traditional allies in the region, all of whom regard the Iranian alliance system, which includes Syria and Hizballah, as their primary enemy. Middle East media are replete with stories of backroom deals between Washington and Tehran. Given the enormous gap between what the Americans are claiming in public about Iran and what they are seen to be doing in private, even the false reports carry an air of plausibility.

Khamenei the Silent Partner

No less a personage than Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, recently joked about the hypocrisy. Emerging from a hospital stay for surgery, he said he’d amused himself during his convalescence by keeping track of the lies of American officials who, while disclaiming any appeals for Iranian assistance, were privately begging for help. Even John Kerry, he delighted in adding, had approached the Iranian foreign minister with cap in hand—the very same Kerry who had piously announced “in front of the whole world, ‘We will not request help from Iran.’”

According to Khamenei, Iran has rejected all of the American requests. But Tehran has indeed permitted operational coordination—sorry, “de-confliction”—with the United States. In effect, Khamenei has set Iran up as America’s silent partner in the Middle East, and Kerry himself, at a recent hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, testified to the value the administration places on this partnership. Grilled by Senator Marco Rubio about glaring deficiencies in the American strategy against IS, Kerry offered a stunning defense. “[Y]ou’re presuming that Iran and Syria don’t have any capacity to take on [IS],” he lectured Rubio. “If we are failing and failing miserably, who knows what choice they might make.”

Iran, in the administration’s view, should thus be seen as a force multiplier for the United States. This line of reasoning has a long history, as one can detect by reading between the lines of Leon Panetta’s new memoir, Worthy Fights. Panetta, who served Obama both as secretary of defense and director of the CIA, recounts how he and his colleagues on the National Security Council (NSC) fought with the president over the American endgame in Iraq. Urged by the NSC to reach an agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for American troops to remain in the country, the president refused. Why? Obama, Panetta explained in a recent interview, nursed “the hope that perhaps others in the world could step up to the plate and take on” the role of stabilizing Iraq.

Which others? Panetta did not specify, but Obama undoubtedly assumed that Iran, the obvious candidate, would see Iraqi stability as in its own self-interest. It was a severe miscalculation. The precipitous departure of the American forces, Panetta argues in his book, removed the United States as a bulwark against Shiite sectarianism and led ineluctably to the alienation of Iraq’s Sunnis—developments that (as Panetta omits to point out) took place under the sheltering umbrella of Iranian power.

Obama Alienating Regional Allies

Later, when civil war broke out in Syria, Obama’s policy was similarly deferential to Tehran, and with similar consequences. In 2012, he rejected another unanimous recommendation of the NSC: this time, to aid the Syrian rebels. It was the same advice he’d received from America’s allies in the Middle East, who grew ever more insistent as it became clear that Iranian intervention was giving Bashar Assad the upper hand. But Obama held his ground and, in doing so, effectively recognized Syria as an Iranian sphere of interest and hence inviolate.

Of course, Obama has never described his calculus in such terms. But he has hinted at it—by, for example, expressing his opposition to American participation in a Sunni-Shiite “proxy war,” which is nothing if not a synonym for a war against Iran.

Impolitic recent statements by Vice President Joseph Biden testify further to the astounding bias in the Obama administration against America’s traditional friends in the Middle East. Discussing the Syrian civil war, Biden developed at length the theme that “our biggest problem is our allies”—even as, on the ground in Syria, coalition military operations against IS are indirectly strengthening those allies’ enemies, starting with Assad. In the words of an American official quoted in the New York Times, “It would be silly for [Assad’s forces] not to take advantage of the U.S. doing airstrikes. . . . Essentially, we’ve allowed them to perform an economy of force. They don’t have to be focused all over the country, just on those who threaten their population centers.”

In the past, to assuage America’s allies who were angry at the pro-Iranian bias in U.S. policy, Obama pledged to build up the anti-Assad rebels in the Free Syrian Army (FSA). But he never really followed through on his pledge. Now he is playing the same tattered card in order to enhance the coalition against IS. But General John Allen, the commander of the coalition, has made the insincerity transparent by stating that training and equipping the FSA “could take years”—in other words, until after Obama has left office.

What would it take for Obama to change course? Here, Turkey has assumed the lead. If the American leader wants Turkey as a full-fledged ally, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has insisted, then he must agree to oust Syria’s Assad. This demand places Obama in a difficult bind. If he fails to gain Turkey as a true partner, the coalition against IS will be hollow at its core. But he has explicitly dedicated himself to avoiding the kind of large-scale war that Turkey requires of him.

More to the point, meeting Turkey’s demand would also entail scuttling the administration’s silent partnership with Iran in Syria—a move that Tehran, for its part, would not take sitting down and might counter by, for instance, bringing Israel under attack. Indeed, as Iran’s deputy foreign minister recently revealed, Tehran has directly warned that efforts by the U.S. or its allies to topple Bashar Assad would place Israel at risk. Hizballah’s October 7 attack on Israeli forces, its first declared such operation since 2006, proves the seriousness of the threat.

Nuclear Negotiations

And Iran has other means of retaliation as well, for instance by adopting an even more recalcitrant position in the current negotiations over its nuclear program. By all accounts, those negotiations are failing. With no agreement expected before November 24, the expiration date of last year’s interim deal, Khamenei can contemplate several possible courses of action. He might, for example, extend the interim deal in return for a reward in the form of further relief from sanctions. That would at least allow Obama to buy time. But what if Khamenei were instead to demand an even more exorbitant reward, or threaten to abandon negotiations altogether?

Either of those choices would deeply complicate Obama’s life, precisely at the moment when the war against IS grows ever more burdensome. Whatever Khamenei chooses, it is he, not Obama, who now holds the initiative.

In brief, our silent partnership with Tehran has simultaneously emboldened Tehran and other enemies and alienated our allies: the very same allies who are vital to subduing IS. In the meantime, that silent partnership not only has done nothing for us, it has considerably weakened our hand—and that of its main proponent, Barack Obama. Yet he shows no sign of considering alternative strategies. No wonder Netanyahu sounded the alarm in New York.

Authors

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http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2014/10/03-flexing-american-muscles-middle-east-doran-debate?rssid=doranm{11F3737F-C69A-4000-885B-283D21D85C5F}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/80154744/0/brookingsrss/experts/doranm~Why-Flexing-Americas-Muscles-in-the-Middle-East-Will-Not-Make-Things-WorseWhy Flexing America's Muscles in the Middle East Will Not Make Things Worse

Remarkably, Miller and Pillar conceded defeat in the opening round of the debate and yet still managed to win it. How is that possible? If you are curious, you will have to watch the whole thing.

I will, however, share with you here a couple of tidbits from my own performance. As the debate developed, my primary goal was to advance the counterintuitive argument that the United States, when it demonstrates a pronounced bias against military action, makes it more likely that it will have no choice but to intervene in a massive, unilateral fashion. In order to keep the Middle East at bay, it must enlist allies, but it cannot succeed at that goal without some application of military force. This, I believe, is the lesson that President Obama has learned in the last three months.

"We want to believe," I argued, "that people in the Middle East love us for the reasons that we love ourselves. It's not true…. [T]he people in the Middle East want us primarily for one thing, and that is our ability to provide security…. Look at Syria today. If we want to solve Syria, or if we just want to make it a little bit better and keep it at a distance, we want to put others out in front. We want to have allies. We would like to have Turkey, one of the most important countries there, go and do things in Syria... They're not going to go out and take risks…if they think that we might do like President Obama did a year ago with Syria and say, ’Ah, you know what? I'm tired of this fight.’ They need to know we're going to go all the way with them and back them no matter what happens, and that requires military force."

When concluding, I said the following:

"We are judged by our action, and we are judged by our inaction. And we are participants by the nature of our size and our historic role in the Middle East in the sectarian conflict, in all of the conflicts in the region, whether we think we are or not, whether we stay out or whether we don't. So, the question is not whether to intervene or not to intervene, it's how to shape what's going on there. And the most important resource that we have in order to keep us from having to have massive interventions like the kind that we had in Iraq in 2003, is to build up our alliances."

"And the only way we can build up our alliances is by providing security to our friends. …[R]ight now our friends in the Middle East don't believe that they can rely on us because, time and again over the last decade, we have backed away from commitments to them. And that's why we have to use military force so that we will not have the kind of wars that Paul wants to prevent."

Remarkably, Miller and Pillar conceded defeat in the opening round of the debate and yet still managed to win it. How is that possible? If you are curious, you will have to watch the whole thing.

I will, however, share with you here a couple of tidbits from my own performance. As the debate developed, my primary goal was to advance the counterintuitive argument that the United States, when it demonstrates a pronounced bias against military action, makes it more likely that it will have no choice but to intervene in a massive, unilateral fashion. In order to keep the Middle East at bay, it must enlist allies, but it cannot succeed at that goal without some application of military force. This, I believe, is the lesson that President Obama has learned in the last three months.

"We want to believe," I argued, "that people in the Middle East love us for the reasons that we love ourselves. It's not true…. [T]he people in the Middle East want us primarily for one thing, and that is our ability to provide security…. Look at Syria today. If we want to solve Syria, or if we just want to make it a little bit better and keep it at a distance, we want to put others out in front. We want to have allies. We would like to have Turkey, one of the most important countries there, go and do things in Syria... They're not going to go out and take risks…if they think that we might do like President Obama did a year ago with Syria and say, ’Ah, you know what? I'm tired of this fight.’ They need to know we're going to go all the way with them and back them no matter what happens, and that requires military force."

When concluding, I said the following:

"We are judged by our action, and we are judged by our inaction. And we are participants by the nature of our size and our historic role in the Middle East in the sectarian conflict, in all of the conflicts in the region, whether we think we are or not, whether we stay out or whether we don't. So, the question is not whether to intervene or not to intervene, it's how to shape what's going on there. And the most important resource that we have in order to keep us from having to have massive interventions like the kind that we had in Iraq in 2003, is to build up our alliances."

"And the only way we can build up our alliances is by providing security to our friends. …[R]ight now our friends in the Middle East don't believe that they can rely on us because, time and again over the last decade, we have backed away from commitments to them. And that's why we have to use military force so that we will not have the kind of wars that Paul wants to prevent."

Authors

]]>
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2014/09/30-central-strategic-question-middle-east-peace-process-obama?rssid=doranm{2A9B6D46-D5BB-4FF4-A392-C3F534E9F9BD}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/80154745/0/brookingsrss/experts/doranm~What-Is-the-Central-Strategic-Question-in-the-Middle-EastWhat Is the Central Strategic Question in the Middle East?

No one explains the durability of the status quo in Israeli-Palestinian relations as well as Elliott Abrams. "What Now for Israel?" demonstrates why, despite the strong will of the United States and Europe to broker a two-state solution, a formal peace remains out of reach. Forty-seven years after the Six-Day War, it’s time to conclude that, in the Middle East, there is nothing more permanent than a temporary arrangement.

While Abrams focuses almost exclusively on Israeli perceptions, including Israeli perceptions of the American role, his analysis demands that we also ask and try to answer the question, "What Now for the United States?"

Before anything else, American leaders need to repudiate, once and for all, what Abrams calls the "epicenter" theory: that is, the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central strategic question in the Middle East. While no American president has embraced this theory in any formal sense, almost every president since Jimmy Carter — and every secretary of state since Cyrus Vance — has taken it as axiomatic that to formulate a Middle East policy means initiating and presiding over a "peace process." We can now see that peace in this sense — that is, an allegedly final agreement, however tenuous, sealed with a handshake on the White House lawn — will be unattainable for the remainder of the Obama administration and probably much, much longer.

More to the point, even if such an agreement were possible, its benefits to the United States would be much less significant than American leaders have tended to assume.

What explains the grip of the epicenter theory on the American imagination? There are many reasons for it, but one of the most important is also one of the simplest: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stirs up passions worldwide and attracts unparalleled attention from the global media. Presidents have unconsciously conflated this political heat with strategic significance. If a conflict generates this much electricity, it must have an explosive influence on the most profound questions of national and international order.

But it is not so. The core threats to American national security in the Middle East today are the rise of the Islamic State (IS), the advance of the Iranian nuclear program, and the spread of Iranian influence throughout the region. They are almost entirely disconnected from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If a peace agreement were signed today, the political landscape of the Middle East would remain more or less the same, and so would the most consequential challenges it poses to the United States.

In addressing those core threats, a fundamental contradiction has bedeviled the policy of the Obama administration. On the one hand, the president has adopted the ambitious goals of convincing Iran to abandon its nuclear program and stabilizing Iraq and Syria. On the other hand, he has displayed a persistent reluctance to commit the level of resources, especially the military resources, necessary to achieve these aims — and an equally deep reluctance to accept the traditional post-World War II leadership role of the American presidency in global affairs.

On the face of it, Obama overcame that reluctance when he announced his strategy to "degrade and ultimately destroy" IS. But the new military campaign flies in the face of the president’s previous actions and policies toward Iraq and Syria, and his ambivalence is still palpable. Despite its billing, the speech outlined an air campaign that will only degrade IS, not destroy it. As a result, Obama still stands before the Iranians and IS like a shaky policeman, his eyes searching for the exit even as his gun is drawn from its holster.

As Abrams explains, this study in self-contradiction has only added to Israel’s reluctance to gamble on a two-state solution. In order to manage the risks of peace, Israel needs the backing of the United States, yet the current administration’s long-term commitment to the region is unpredictable. And it is not only Benjamin Netanyahu who questions American reliability. The Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, and Emiratis are equally unnerved, especially because now, when it comes to dealing with IS, Obama’s mixed messages have coincided with an ever-deepening American coordination with Iran itself, the bitter rival of America’s closest Arab allies.

The week before Obama’s speech, these same Arab allies riveted their attention on the military coalition that liberated Amerli, the Turkmen city in Iraq that was under siege by IS. While American planes attacked IS from the air, Shiite militiamen, Iraqi soldiers, and Kurdish peshmerga fighters attacked on the ground. Of them all, it was the Shiite militiamen — trained in Iran — who actually took physical control of the city, and who reportedly did so, moreover, under the watchful eye of Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Tehran’s Quds Force ("Jerusalem Brigade").

Has the United States become the air arm of Iranian proxies? Will the convergence of Iranian and American interests with respect to IS lessen Washington’s (already questionable) inclination to force concessions from Tehran on its nuclear program? Will Washington now scant the advice and concerns of its traditional allies in favor of closer attentiveness to Iran and its subsidiaries and stand-ins?

Plagued by such doubts, America’s Arab allies have banded together into a bloc designed to protect the status quo — a bloc that now coordinates closely with, of all countries, Israel. Pointing to this unprecedented regional turnabout, Netanyahu speaks of "a new political horizon." Whether the new alignment will satisfy Israeli expectations remains to be seen. But it could and should definitely serve as the foundation for a new and comprehensive American strategy.

The creation of the broad anti-IS front offers an opportunity to welcome this bloc into the inner circle of a coalition, which the U.S. should use not only to subdue IS but simultaneously to sideline Iran and Syria. At the same time, it could serve to help stabilize the status quo in Israeli-Palestinian relations. As Abrams points out, most Israelis, even many on the political Right, do not relish the idea of ruling over four million Palestinians. Thus, even as the immediate prospects of a peace accord recede, the two-state solution still remains the only game in town.

In the Israeli-Palestinian arena, instead of brokering meetings between Netanyahu and Abbas to achieve the impossible — a settlement of the entire conflict — the U.S.-led coalition could adopt a more modest and more productive approach. Desirable now is diplomacy aimed at forming a stable, autonomous entity on the West Bank. Of course, such an entity could not be established formally, because the Palestinians would likely regard signing off on it as a renunciation of their national rights. But it may be within reach to craft a set of unofficial rules of the game that will strengthen the status quo and conduce to further mutual accommodations in the interest of all parties. Call it a code of conduct.

For example: the construction of new Israeli settlements east of the separation barrier, imperiling the status quo, would be considered a violation of the code of conduct and grounds for significant protest not just by the United States but also by Israel’s new Arab partners. By contrast, the code would hardly regard the growth of Israeli settlements within the major settlement blocks — towns and cities that, everyone agrees, will eventually be absorbed into Israel proper — as cause for alarm.

Another example would be a plan to expand what is known as Area A, namely, that part of the West Bank in which, according to the Oslo accords, the Palestinian Authority enjoys full control. While, again, full-blown peace is impossible, the gradual expansion of Area A until it incorporates all of what is now Area B, where security control is mixed between Israelis and Palestinians, is within the realm of the achievable. At the same time, Area B could expand to include parts of Area C, in which, currently, Israelis wield complete control.

In return for supporting such a movement toward Palestinian autonomy, the Israelis would rightfully expect, especially in the all-important field of security, reciprocal gestures by the Palestinian Authority as well as by the PA's Arab supporters.

Presiding over the development of a code of conduct is not the stuff of which Nobel peace prizes are made. But it is important work. What is more, it will not divert American attention from the task that matters most: countering IS and, especially, Iran.

Authors

No one explains the durability of the status quo in Israeli-Palestinian relations as well as Elliott Abrams. "What Now for Israel?" demonstrates why, despite the strong will of the United States and Europe to broker a two-state solution, a formal peace remains out of reach. Forty-seven years after the Six-Day War, it’s time to conclude that, in the Middle East, there is nothing more permanent than a temporary arrangement.

While Abrams focuses almost exclusively on Israeli perceptions, including Israeli perceptions of the American role, his analysis demands that we also ask and try to answer the question, "What Now for the United States?"

Before anything else, American leaders need to repudiate, once and for all, what Abrams calls the "epicenter" theory: that is, the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central strategic question in the Middle East. While no American president has embraced this theory in any formal sense, almost every president since Jimmy Carter — and every secretary of state since Cyrus Vance — has taken it as axiomatic that to formulate a Middle East policy means initiating and presiding over a "peace process." We can now see that peace in this sense — that is, an allegedly final agreement, however tenuous, sealed with a handshake on the White House lawn — will be unattainable for the remainder of the Obama administration and probably much, much longer.

More to the point, even if such an agreement were possible, its benefits to the United States would be much less significant than American leaders have tended to assume.

What explains the grip of the epicenter theory on the American imagination? There are many reasons for it, but one of the most important is also one of the simplest: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stirs up passions worldwide and attracts unparalleled attention from the global media. Presidents have unconsciously conflated this political heat with strategic significance. If a conflict generates this much electricity, it must have an explosive influence on the most profound questions of national and international order.

But it is not so. The core threats to American national security in the Middle East today are the rise of the Islamic State (IS), the advance of the Iranian nuclear program, and the spread of Iranian influence throughout the region. They are almost entirely disconnected from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If a peace agreement were signed today, the political landscape of the Middle East would remain more or less the same, and so would the most consequential challenges it poses to the United States.

In addressing those core threats, a fundamental contradiction has bedeviled the policy of the Obama administration. On the one hand, the president has adopted the ambitious goals of convincing Iran to abandon its nuclear program and stabilizing Iraq and Syria. On the other hand, he has displayed a persistent reluctance to commit the level of resources, especially the military resources, necessary to achieve these aims — and an equally deep reluctance to accept the traditional post-World War II leadership role of the American presidency in global affairs.

On the face of it, Obama overcame that reluctance when he announced his strategy to "degrade and ultimately destroy" IS. But the new military campaign flies in the face of the president’s previous actions and policies toward Iraq and Syria, and his ambivalence is still palpable. Despite its billing, the speech outlined an air campaign that will only degrade IS, not destroy it. As a result, Obama still stands before the Iranians and IS like a shaky policeman, his eyes searching for the exit even as his gun is drawn from its holster.

As Abrams explains, this study in self-contradiction has only added to Israel’s reluctance to gamble on a two-state solution. In order to manage the risks of peace, Israel needs the backing of the United States, yet the current administration’s long-term commitment to the region is unpredictable. And it is not only Benjamin Netanyahu who questions American reliability. The Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, and Emiratis are equally unnerved, especially because now, when it comes to dealing with IS, Obama’s mixed messages have coincided with an ever-deepening American coordination with Iran itself, the bitter rival of America’s closest Arab allies.

The week before Obama’s speech, these same Arab allies riveted their attention on the military coalition that liberated Amerli, the Turkmen city in Iraq that was under siege by IS. While American planes attacked IS from the air, Shiite militiamen, Iraqi soldiers, and Kurdish peshmerga fighters attacked on the ground. Of them all, it was the Shiite militiamen — trained in Iran — who actually took physical control of the city, and who reportedly did so, moreover, under the watchful eye of Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Tehran’s Quds Force ("Jerusalem Brigade").

Has the United States become the air arm of Iranian proxies? Will the convergence of Iranian and American interests with respect to IS lessen Washington’s (already questionable) inclination to force concessions from Tehran on its nuclear program? Will Washington now scant the advice and concerns of its traditional allies in favor of closer attentiveness to Iran and its subsidiaries and stand-ins?

Plagued by such doubts, America’s Arab allies have banded together into a bloc designed to protect the status quo — a bloc that now coordinates closely with, of all countries, Israel. Pointing to this unprecedented regional turnabout, Netanyahu speaks of "a new political horizon." Whether the new alignment will satisfy Israeli expectations remains to be seen. But it could and should definitely serve as the foundation for a new and comprehensive American strategy.

The creation of the broad anti-IS front offers an opportunity to welcome this bloc into the inner circle of a coalition, which the U.S. should use not only to subdue IS but simultaneously to sideline Iran and Syria. At the same time, it could serve to help stabilize the status quo in Israeli-Palestinian relations. As Abrams points out, most Israelis, even many on the political Right, do not relish the idea of ruling over four million Palestinians. Thus, even as the immediate prospects of a peace accord recede, the two-state solution still remains the only game in town.

In the Israeli-Palestinian arena, instead of brokering meetings between Netanyahu and Abbas to achieve the impossible — a settlement of the entire conflict — the U.S.-led coalition could adopt a more modest and more productive approach. Desirable now is diplomacy aimed at forming a stable, autonomous entity on the West Bank. Of course, such an entity could not be established formally, because the Palestinians would likely regard signing off on it as a renunciation of their national rights. But it may be within reach to craft a set of unofficial rules of the game that will strengthen the status quo and conduce to further mutual accommodations in the interest of all parties. Call it a code of conduct.

For example: the construction of new Israeli settlements east of the separation barrier, imperiling the status quo, would be considered a violation of the code of conduct and grounds for significant protest not just by the United States but also by Israel’s new Arab partners. By contrast, the code would hardly regard the growth of Israeli settlements within the major settlement blocks — towns and cities that, everyone agrees, will eventually be absorbed into Israel proper — as cause for alarm.

Another example would be a plan to expand what is known as Area A, namely, that part of the West Bank in which, according to the Oslo accords, the Palestinian Authority enjoys full control. While, again, full-blown peace is impossible, the gradual expansion of Area A until it incorporates all of what is now Area B, where security control is mixed between Israelis and Palestinians, is within the realm of the achievable. At the same time, Area B could expand to include parts of Area C, in which, currently, Israelis wield complete control.

In return for supporting such a movement toward Palestinian autonomy, the Israelis would rightfully expect, especially in the all-important field of security, reciprocal gestures by the Palestinian Authority as well as by the PA's Arab supporters.

Presiding over the development of a code of conduct is not the stuff of which Nobel peace prizes are made. But it is important work. What is more, it will not divert American attention from the task that matters most: countering IS and, especially, Iran.

Wednesday night, President Obama gave a speech outlining his plan to combat the growing force of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL). Brookings scholars had an email conversation sharing their reactions to the speech. An edited version of that conversation is below.

Tamara Cofman Wittes, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:Obama didn’t articulate a clear "theory of the case" about how to defeat ISIS.

A few thoughts to kick off what I expect will be a good discussion on the speech:

If the four components laid out by the president last night make up the administration’s anti-ISIS strategy, then they’ve had that strategy ready for some weeks. We already knew the “no strategy yet” media focus was a red herring, but other than making explicit his readiness to strike in Syria, there is little he said last night that the administration had not already said.

It's striking to me that in launching what is, in many ways, a reversal of his previous six years of policy in the Middle East, signaling a turning-back of focused American attention toward this region, he didn't feel the need to take much time in this speech to explain to the American people the real nature of the threat ISIS poses to the United States and its interests, and why this new approach, with all its inherent risks and costs, is necessary. In that light, I’d say that the president last night defined a war aim (degrade/eventually defeat ISIS), but not a strategic objective for U.S. policy.

The threat to U.S. personnel in Iraq and the "potential threat" of foreign fighters targeting the homeland is a thin reed as a basis for building a major international coalition and opening a new, long-lasting front in the war on terrorism. This problem was compounded by his linking the anti-ISIS campaign to ongoing U.S. efforts in Yemen and Somalia. Either ISIS presents something new and particularly challenging that requires a different American approach, or the anti-ISIS struggle is just a continuation of the counter-terrorism efforts he's undertaken through targeted military strikes, security cooperation, financial tools and diplomatic effort since taking office. I wish the president had been clearer about which way he views the new enterprise he just announced.

In my own view, the real threat from ISIS to U.S. interests is that ISIS is not just a terrorist group, pure and simple (as the president put it last night). It's a terroristic army and aspiring government that seeks to overrun not just state borders but states themselves, and by doing so, to overturn the regional order on which a large chunk of the global economy rests. We can't allow that to happen, and that is ultimately why we are willing to increase our limited military engagement and risk wider conflict.

The president understandably said very little last night about the risks of this new endeavor, among which I would highlight unintended escalation. And even though he made clear what he won't do (or thinks he won't do), there is still a slippery slope problem for the United States, particularly since he didn't clearly define the threat, set an unreasonable and unreachable standard for success (destroy ISIS), and didn’t articulate a clear "theory of the case" about how to defeat ISIS. I am concerned that these weaknesses in the administration’s rationale so far make unintended escalation more likely. Yikes.

Daniel Byman, Senior Fellow and Director of Research, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:I’m worried about the risk of spillover affecting stability issues in other countries.

I was happier, I guess. I wasn't expecting any great detail from this speech. Rather, I was pleased that he was engaging the American people directly -- something he avoided on Libya, in particular, which I found very frustrating. I see #1 as for a much longer speech or a policy document. As far as the real threat, I was glad he put the threat of ISIS-linked terrorism in proper perspective. I'd add the risk of spillover. We've already seen it in Iraq, and I'm worried about Lebanon in particular (though not of huge strategic importance) and stability issues in other neighbors. I have some further thoughts on Iraq in reaction to the speech I wrote for the Brookings blog.

Michael O'Hanlon, Director of Research, Foreign Policy Program and Senior Fellow , Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Foreign Policy Program:The strategy underscores just how far there is to go.

I was about a five in happiness level, on a scale of one to 10. One more point: his fleeting mention of a Sunni National Guard concept was welcome--but gosh, I think it deserves more than six or eight words. It's a crucial element of the strategy--create Sunni units to fight for their homeland, sort of an institutionalized version of the Sons of Iraq. But whether you like it or not, the sheer fact that the strategy depends on yet-to-be-developed new military units in Iraq (and, as Kenneth Pollack and others of us have written, a yet-to-be developed new Syrian opposition force) underscores just how far there is to go--and how much more we may need to do, ourselves, to help if it is to succeed in the end (in my assessment of the situation).

My view is that a true commitment to a Syrian opposition force will never materialize. I do admit that the engagement of the Saudis and others does increase the chance for a revitalized Free Syrian Army, and it offers us an opportunity, through articles like Kenneth Pollack's fine Foreign Affairs piece, to push for it. But the president has long ago transmitted his deepest feelings on the subject, so I will believe it only when I see it.

William McCants, Director, U.S. Relations with the Islamic World and Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:The president didn't do enough to ensure that the current high public support for attacking ISIS will last.

Level with the American people about the real danger of ISIS. ISIS is an immediate danger to our Arab allies, not to us.

Explain how hard it's going to be to actually destroy ISIS because of its home base in Syria, where there's no capable proxy yet and Assad doesn't want us there.

Explain how we ensure that another ISIS won't arise to take its place once we're done.

On point one, I was pleasantly surprised the president didn't hype the threat of ISIS to the homeland. But I was disappointed he didn't say more about the regional order we're actually fighting to protect. On points two and three, I didn't hear much of anything.

Taken all together, the president didn't do enough to ensure that the current high public support for attacking ISIS will last.

One small gripe: The president characterized ISIS as a terrorist group and his response as counter-terrorism. I imagine there are good political (and perhaps legal) reasons to use that language. But this is a war against an insurgent group.

Ken Pollack, Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:I continue to believe that the rationale the president is employing is a huge mistake.

Here's a bit of my take. Like many of you, I had a mixed reaction to the speech.

Some things that I thought positive:

The overall tone. Like Dan, I thought that this speech was in marked contrast to others Obama had given, particularly the awful and overdue Libya speech. In this he was trying to convey determination, a pressing need and the call to American exceptionalism that other presidents have employed to rally the nation. That's a winning combination that has long been absent from Obama's foreign policy addresses (and policies), and I think this absence is one of the reasons that he gets such low marks on foreign policy at home and abroad.

More specifically, I was struck by how he was leaning forward on Iraq. The Iraqi government is still a far cry from inclusive, let alone effective. I was watching to see if he was going to use that as an excuse for inaction, but he did the opposite. He said that what the Iraqis had done was good enough and we were now going to shift over to an offensive strategy (in Iraq), rebuild the Iraqi military and start to roll back ISIS. That is very different from even the Barack Obama from June-July who was still very reticent to get involved and looking for excuses not to. Now, as Mike Doran rightly notes, I worry that either this is just rhetoric now or he will lose his commitment in the near future. But I think it noteworthy that the Iraqi reality could have justified continued dithering and he set that aside and pledged action.

Some things I thought were negative:

As you all have already noted, the Syria piece is very much up in the air. Now, this is a public speech and I don't expect any president to lay out the details of a military strategy there, but we still have no clue what he intends to do in Syria and, as Will correctly notes, you can't just drive ISIS out of Iraq without dealing with Syria. I noted that he was careful to differentiate the two campaigns--Iraq would be a military offensive, Syria would be a counter-terrorism campaign. A counter-terrorism campaign is not going to cut it in Syria. The Saudi offer to furnish the training base is very big, but the administration still has not signaled a willingness to go beyond the half-assed current policy. I have spent much of this week on the Hill and both parties remain very frustrated that the administration won't outline a Syria strategy in private. As one senior Democratic congressman put it to me yesterday, “they are saying,” give us the money and trust us.’”

I continue to believe that the rationale the president is employing is a huge mistake. I agree with Tamara that he should have reminded the American people that this is ultimately about oil and our economy (and Will, we need to acknowledge that that is where our ultimate interest in the Arab states lies). And I think other presidents have done that in ways that were not crass but sufficiently stirring to move the American public. Constantly resting this policy on the canard that Americans are directly at risk is at best cynical and at worst, downright duplicitous. If that were really the issue, we could evacuate the Americans over there in an afternoon. At least Bush had the decency to pin his policy to a threat that everyone believed. More importantly, I think that relying on what is transparently not the reason we are acting makes Obama look weak and undermines the determination that I noted above was one of the more positive aspects of the speech.

Ultimately, it was just a speech; a speech that was nothing but an effort to undo his mistake from two weeks earlier. I think we now really need to focus on what they do!

Martin Indyk, Vice President and Director, Foreign Policy Program:ISIS is a state and that’s its Achilles heel.

In devising a strategy for combating ISIS, the United States has one advantage that arises from the biggest vulnerability of the "Islamic Caliphate." Contrary to what President Obama said last night, they are a "state" in the sense that they have taken control of a large swath of territory and assumed responsibility for the millions of people who live there. As Hamas discovered in Gaza that puts them in a fundamental dilemma: do they feed the people or fight the enemy? That's why Osama bin Laden so opposed establishing the caliphate. Hamas resolved the dilemma by entering into a truce with Israel, while preparing to fight it later. But when Egypt dried up its sources of revenue for feeding the people by shutting down its smuggling tunnels, Hamas tried to hand back that responsibility to the Palestinian Authority. Pretty soon now Gazans will likely turn against them, especially because neither Egypt nor the Palestinian Authority will relieve their plight until Hamas relinquishes control of the territory. As Abu Mazen told Khaled Mashal, "I refuse to be a fez on a scarecrow."

In ISIS's case, their control of territory gives the United States a clear target to go after (the terrain of their state advantages airpower). And their need to feed the people means that the more effectively we can dry up their sources of revenue, the more discontent they will face. This will take time, but it is certainly achievable and it relieves some of the problems of not having boots on the ground.

This is going to be a long war and that means that it's going to be primarily waged on the next president's watch. Obama's principal contribution is that he turned his Middle East policy around, and enjoys the support of the Congress and the American people for doing so. Turning the ship of state around in the prevailing circumstances is what matters here. We were in the process of withdrawing from the Middle East and that has had a dramatic impact on our influence with all the players there. Now we're coming back - gradually, hesitatingly no doubt. But the direction is clear. If President Obama had tried to turn public opinion around with full-throated and passionate words about the threat to our homeland and great statesmanlike rhetoric about America's responsibility to create a new order in the Middle East, he would not have the American people with him. They're tired of all that and, when it comes to the Middle East, don't believe it any more. So from my point of view, the speech was just what was needed -- good enough for government work. Now let's take up our responsibility -- to articulate and debate the strategy for winning this war and try to help the next president create a new order out of chaos.

Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy and Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and Director, Intelligence Project, Foreign Policy Program:ISIS poses a number of challenges, including a hostage challenge.

The Islamic State poses a number of challenges, including potential threats to the homeland in the future, an immediate ideological threat and the insurgent threat. It also is a hostage challenge. The United States has not confronted a significant hostage/counter-terrorism problem since 1991. When it did, two presidents found it extremely difficult to handle. The public wants the hostages rescued, not grand strategy (Martin rightly reminds us that is for think tanks). Carter lost his bid for reelection at the first Gulf War; Reagan traded arms for hostages and narrowly escaped impeachment. The elder Bush found a winning strategy in 1991 because he had something to give Iran/Hezbollah and because Saddam Hussein had inadvertently freed the captives Imad Mughniyah wanted to trade hostages for.

The Islamic State's next move is probably to execute a third hostage, probably a U.K. citizen; they have at least five U.S. and U.K. hostages and can easily acquire more. The American public will find a disconnect between a three-year or longer strategic response, no matter how smart, and images of horror on the nightly news. It could easily get worse. Al Qaeda in Pakistan has one American hostage (completely forgotten by the media) and could take more easily in Pakistan. Al Qaeda in the Maghreb is basically a kidnap/extortion machine, but has avoided Americans until now-- that could change.

Obama may face two or more years of hostage taking and executions, which seem to underscore the limits of American power. It will be easy for critics to charge him as weak and ineffective without of course providing a policy that stops hostage taking.

Wednesday night, President Obama gave a speech outlining his plan to combat the growing force of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL). Brookings scholars had an email conversation sharing their reactions to the speech. An edited version of that conversation is below.

Tamara Cofman Wittes, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
Obama didn’t articulate a clear "theory of the case" about how to defeat ISIS.

A few thoughts to kick off what I expect will be a good discussion on the speech:

If the four components laid out by the president last night make up the administration’s anti-ISIS strategy, then they’ve had that strategy ready for some weeks. We already knew the “no strategy yet” media focus was a red herring, but other than making explicit his readiness to strike in Syria, there is little he said last night that the administration had not already said.

It's striking to me that in launching what is, in many ways, a reversal of his previous six years of policy in the Middle East, signaling a turning-back of focused American attention toward this region, he didn't feel the need to take much time in this speech to explain to the American people the real nature of the threat ISIS poses to the United States and its interests, and why this new approach, with all its inherent risks and costs, is necessary. In that light, I’d say that the president last night defined a war aim (degrade/eventually defeat ISIS), but not a strategic objective for U.S. policy.

The threat to U.S. personnel in Iraq and the "potential threat" of foreign fighters targeting the homeland is a thin reed as a basis for building a major international coalition and opening a new, long-lasting front in the war on terrorism. This problem was compounded by his linking the anti-ISIS campaign to ongoing U.S. efforts in Yemen and Somalia. Either ISIS presents something new and particularly challenging that requires a different American approach, or the anti-ISIS struggle is just a continuation of the counter-terrorism efforts he's undertaken through targeted military strikes, security cooperation, financial tools and diplomatic effort since taking office. I wish the president had been clearer about which way he views the new enterprise he just announced.

In my own view, the real threat from ISIS to U.S. interests is that ISIS is not just a terrorist group, pure and simple (as the president put it last night). It's a terroristic army and aspiring government that seeks to overrun not just state borders but states themselves, and by doing so, to overturn the regional order on which a large chunk of the global economy rests. We can't allow that to happen, and that is ultimately why we are willing to increase our limited military engagement and risk wider conflict.

The president understandably said very little last night about the risks of this new endeavor, among which I would highlight unintended escalation. And even though he made clear what he won't do (or thinks he won't do), there is still a slippery slope problem for the United States, particularly since he didn't clearly define the threat, set an unreasonable and unreachable standard for success (destroy ISIS), and didn’t articulate a clear "theory of the case" about how to defeat ISIS. I am concerned that these weaknesses in the administration’s rationale so far make unintended escalation more likely. Yikes.

Daniel Byman, Senior Fellow and Director of Research, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
I’m worried about the risk of spillover affecting stability issues in other countries.

I was happier, I guess. I wasn't expecting any great detail from this speech. Rather, I was pleased that he was engaging the American people directly -- something he avoided on Libya, in particular, which I found very frustrating. I see #1 as for a much longer speech or a policy document. As far as the real threat, I was glad he put the threat of ISIS-linked terrorism in proper perspective. I'd add the risk of spillover. We've already seen it in Iraq, and I'm worried about Lebanon in particular (though not of huge strategic importance) and stability issues in other neighbors. I have some further thoughts on Iraq in reaction to the speech I wrote for the Brookings blog.

Michael O'Hanlon, Director of Research, Foreign Policy Program and Senior Fellow , Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Foreign Policy Program:
The strategy underscores just how far there is to go.

I was about a five in happiness level, on a scale of one to 10. One more point: his fleeting mention of a Sunni National Guard concept was welcome--but gosh, I think it deserves more than six or eight words. It's a crucial element of the strategy--create Sunni units to fight for their homeland, sort of an institutionalized version of the Sons of Iraq. But whether you like it or not, the sheer fact that the strategy depends on yet-to-be-developed new military units in Iraq (and, as Kenneth Pollack and others of us have written, a yet-to-be developed new Syrian opposition force) underscores just how far there is to go--and how much more we may need to do, ourselves, to help if it is to succeed in the end (in my assessment of the situation).

Michael Doran, Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
A true commitment to a Syrian opposition force will never materialize.

My view is that a true commitment to a Syrian opposition force will never materialize. I do admit that the engagement of the Saudis and others does increase the chance for a revitalized Free Syrian Army, and it offers us an opportunity, through articles like Kenneth Pollack's fine Foreign Affairs piece, to push for it. But the president has long ago transmitted his deepest feelings on the subject, so I will believe it only when I see it.

William McCants, Director, U.S. Relations with the Islamic World and Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
The president didn't do enough to ensure that the current high public support for attacking ISIS will last.

Level with the American people about the real danger of ISIS. ISIS is an immediate danger to our Arab allies, not to us.

Explain how hard it's going to be to actually destroy ISIS because of its home base in Syria, where there's no capable proxy yet and Assad doesn't want us there.

Explain how we ensure that another ISIS won't arise to take its place once we're done.

On point one, I was pleasantly surprised the president didn't hype the threat of ISIS to the homeland. But I was disappointed he didn't say more about the regional order we're actually fighting to protect. On points two and three, I didn't hear much of anything.

Taken all together, the president didn't do enough to ensure that the current high public support for attacking ISIS will last.

One small gripe: The president characterized ISIS as a terrorist group and his response as counter-terrorism. I imagine there are good political (and perhaps legal) reasons to use that language. But this is a war against an insurgent group.

Ken Pollack, Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
I continue to believe that the rationale the president is employing is a huge mistake.

Here's a bit of my take. Like many of you, I had a mixed reaction to the speech.

Some things that I thought positive:

The overall tone. Like Dan, I thought that this speech was in marked contrast to others Obama had given, particularly the awful and overdue Libya speech. In this he was trying to convey determination, a pressing need and the call to American exceptionalism that other presidents have employed to rally the nation. That's a winning combination that has long been absent from Obama's foreign policy addresses (and policies), and I think this absence is one of the reasons that he gets such low marks on foreign policy at home and abroad.

More specifically, I was struck by how he was leaning forward on Iraq. The Iraqi government is still a far cry from inclusive, let alone effective. I was watching to see if he was going to use that as an excuse for inaction, but he did the opposite. He said that what the Iraqis had done was good enough and we were now going to shift over to an offensive strategy (in Iraq), rebuild the Iraqi military and start to roll back ISIS. That is very different from even the Barack Obama from June-July who was still very reticent to get involved and looking for excuses not to. Now, as Mike Doran rightly notes, I worry that either this is just rhetoric now or he will lose his commitment in the near future. But I think it noteworthy that the Iraqi reality could have justified continued dithering and he set that aside and pledged action.

Some things I thought were negative:

As you all have already noted, the Syria piece is very much up in the air. Now, this is a public speech and I don't expect any president to lay out the details of a military strategy there, but we still have no clue what he intends to do in Syria and, as Will correctly notes, you can't just drive ISIS out of Iraq without dealing with Syria. I noted that he was careful to differentiate the two campaigns--Iraq would be a military offensive, Syria would be a counter-terrorism campaign. A counter-terrorism campaign is not going to cut it in Syria. The Saudi offer to furnish the training base is very big, but the administration still has not signaled a willingness to go beyond the half-assed current policy. I have spent much of this week on the Hill and both parties remain very frustrated that the administration won't outline a Syria strategy in private. As one senior Democratic congressman put it to me yesterday, “they are saying,” give us the money and trust us.’”

I continue to believe that the rationale the president is employing is a huge mistake. I agree with Tamara that he should have reminded the American people that this is ultimately about oil and our economy (and Will, we need to acknowledge that that is where our ultimate interest in the Arab states lies). And I think other presidents have done that in ways that were not crass but sufficiently stirring to move the American public. Constantly resting this policy on the canard that Americans are directly at risk is at best cynical and at worst, downright duplicitous. If that were really the issue, we could evacuate the Americans over there in an afternoon. At least Bush had the decency to pin his policy to a threat that everyone believed. More importantly, I think that relying on what is transparently not the reason we are acting makes Obama look weak and undermines the determination that I noted above was one of the more positive aspects of the speech.

Ultimately, it was just a speech; a speech that was nothing but an effort to undo his mistake from two weeks earlier. I think we now really need to focus on what they do!

Martin Indyk, Vice President and Director, Foreign Policy Program:
ISIS is a state and that’s its Achilles heel.

In devising a strategy for combating ISIS, the United States has one advantage that arises from the biggest vulnerability of the "Islamic Caliphate." Contrary to what President Obama said last night, they are a "state" in the sense that they have taken control of a large swath of territory and assumed responsibility for the millions of people who live there. As Hamas discovered in Gaza that puts them in a fundamental dilemma: do they feed the people or fight the enemy? That's why Osama bin Laden so opposed establishing the caliphate. Hamas resolved the dilemma by entering into a truce with Israel, while preparing to fight it later. But when Egypt dried up its sources of revenue for feeding the people by shutting down its smuggling tunnels, Hamas tried to hand back that responsibility to the Palestinian Authority. Pretty soon now Gazans will likely turn against them, especially because neither Egypt nor the Palestinian Authority will relieve their plight until Hamas relinquishes control of the territory. As Abu Mazen told Khaled Mashal, "I refuse to be a fez on a scarecrow."

In ISIS's case, their control of territory gives the United States a clear target to go after (the terrain of their state advantages airpower). And their need to feed the people means that the more effectively we can dry up their sources of revenue, the more discontent they will face. This will take time, but it is certainly achievable and it relieves some of the problems of not having boots on the ground.

This is going to be a long war and that means that it's going to be primarily waged on the next president's watch. Obama's principal contribution is that he turned his Middle East policy around, and enjoys the support of the Congress and the American people for doing so. Turning the ship of state around in the prevailing circumstances is what matters here. We were in the process of withdrawing from the Middle East and that has had a dramatic impact on our influence with all the players there. Now we're coming back - gradually, hesitatingly no doubt. But the direction is clear. If President Obama had tried to turn public opinion around with full-throated and passionate words about the threat to our homeland and great statesmanlike rhetoric about America's responsibility to create a new order in the Middle East, he would not have the American people with him. They're tired of all that and, when it comes to the Middle East, don't believe it any more. So from my point of view, the speech was just what was needed -- good enough for government work. Now let's take up our responsibility -- to articulate and debate the strategy for winning this war and try to help the next president create a new order out of chaos.

Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy and Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and Director, Intelligence Project, Foreign Policy Program:
ISIS poses a number of challenges, including a hostage challenge.

The Islamic State poses a number of challenges, including potential threats to the homeland in the future, an immediate ideological threat and the insurgent threat. It also is a hostage challenge. The United States has not confronted a significant hostage/counter-terrorism problem since 1991. When it did, two presidents found it extremely difficult to handle. The public wants the hostages rescued, not grand strategy (Martin rightly reminds us that is for think tanks). Carter lost his bid for reelection at the first Gulf War; Reagan traded arms for hostages and narrowly escaped impeachment. The elder Bush found a winning strategy in 1991 because he had something to give Iran/Hezbollah and because Saddam Hussein had inadvertently freed the captives Imad Mughniyah wanted to trade hostages for.

The Islamic State's next move is probably to execute a third hostage, probably a U.K. citizen; they have at least five U.S. and U.K. hostages and can easily acquire more. The American public will find a disconnect between a three-year or longer strategic response, no matter how smart, and images of horror on the nightly news. It could easily get worse. Al Qaeda in Pakistan has one American hostage (completely forgotten by the media) and could take more easily in Pakistan. Al Qaeda in the Maghreb is basically a kidnap/extortion machine, but has avoided Americans until now-- that could change.

Obama may face two or more years of hostage taking and executions, which seem to underscore the limits of American power. It will be easy for critics to charge him as weak and ineffective without of course providing a policy that stops hostage taking.

Authors

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http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2014/09/11-doran-obama-embraces-military-intervention-in-iraq-and-syria?rssid=doranm{824C60A6-9BE9-4043-9117-F8F2FABB3EA1}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/80154749/0/brookingsrss/experts/doranm~Obama-Embraces-Military-Intervention-in-Iraq-and-Syria-%e2%80%94ReluctantlyObama Embraces Military Intervention in Iraq and Syria —Reluctantly

One word in President Obama’s speech announcing his campaign against the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL) brought to mind President Eisenhower’s sly behavior during the Dien Bien Phu crisis of 1954.

I’ll get to that word in a minute, but let’s first recall that Dien Bien Phu was a fortified French outpost in the northwest corner of Vietnam, on the Laos border. In March 1954, the communist Vietnamese laid siege to it, and quickly gained advantage. If the French were to lose, a good portion of Vietnam would inevitably fall to communism. As awareness of French vulnerability grew, the key question was whether the United States would intervene to save the Western position. It was at this moment, in early April, that Eisenhower delivered a speech referencing what would soon become known as “the domino theory”—the idea that if Vietnam were to fall, the rest of countries of Southeast Asia would follow like a chain of dominoes.

Such rhetoric led listeners to believe that Eisenhower regarded a victory against communism as a vital American interest. The reference to falling dominoes, however, was actually a massive head fake—quintessential Ike. “Privately,” the historian Jean Edward Smith writes, “Eisenhower was setting out the conditions for American involvement in such a way so as to ensure that it did not happen.” The president had a strong political incentive to dissimulate: a French victory in Vietnam would require a massive American investment in men and material, yet Eisenhower had been elected to end a war in Asia, not start a new one.

Obama is a self-professed fan of Eisenhower’s efforts to avoid military intervention in Viet Nam. And like Ike, he sees himself as a president who was elected to end old wars in Asia, not to start new ones. On the face of it, then, the decision to launch a military campaign against IS represents a repudiation of the president’s opposition to military intervention. In truth, however, Obama’s newfound aggressiveness contains more than a smidgen of Eisenhower-style dissimulation.

Which brings me to the magic word. Obama announced that his strategy would “degrade and ultimately destroy” the enemy. The word “ultimately” deserves special attention. Obama has left us with the strong impression that he is dedicated to defeating IS, but the method that he has adopted – air strikes – will not do the job. Therefore, Obama has pushed the actual hour of defeat to some hazy point in the distant future. How distant? John Kerry recently said that it would take three years to defeat IS. In other words, Obama has decided to hand off the last and decisive stage of the war – the part where we actually win – to the next administration.

It would be uncharitable to call the new policy a head fake. Obama has definitely changed course in very real and significant way. However, it is also true that he has yet to overcome his reluctance to define what victory would look like and to develop a strategy that will actually achieve it. Keeping the Middle East at arm’s length remains the defining characteristic of his policy.

Authors

One word in President Obama’s speech announcing his campaign against the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL) brought to mind President Eisenhower’s sly behavior during the Dien Bien Phu crisis of 1954.

I’ll get to that word in a minute, but let’s first recall that Dien Bien Phu was a fortified French outpost in the northwest corner of Vietnam, on the Laos border. In March 1954, the communist Vietnamese laid siege to it, and quickly gained advantage. If the French were to lose, a good portion of Vietnam would inevitably fall to communism. As awareness of French vulnerability grew, the key question was whether the United States would intervene to save the Western position. It was at this moment, in early April, that Eisenhower delivered a speech referencing what would soon become known as “the domino theory”—the idea that if Vietnam were to fall, the rest of countries of Southeast Asia would follow like a chain of dominoes.

Such rhetoric led listeners to believe that Eisenhower regarded a victory against communism as a vital American interest. The reference to falling dominoes, however, was actually a massive head fake—quintessential Ike. “Privately,” the historian Jean Edward Smith writes, “Eisenhower was setting out the conditions for American involvement in such a way so as to ensure that it did not happen.” The president had a strong political incentive to dissimulate: a French victory in Vietnam would require a massive American investment in men and material, yet Eisenhower had been elected to end a war in Asia, not start a new one.

Obama is a self-professed fan of Eisenhower’s efforts to avoid military intervention in Viet Nam. And like Ike, he sees himself as a president who was elected to end old wars in Asia, not to start new ones. On the face of it, then, the decision to launch a military campaign against IS represents a repudiation of the president’s opposition to military intervention. In truth, however, Obama’s newfound aggressiveness contains more than a smidgen of Eisenhower-style dissimulation.

Which brings me to the magic word. Obama announced that his strategy would “degrade and ultimately destroy” the enemy. The word “ultimately” deserves special attention. Obama has left us with the strong impression that he is dedicated to defeating IS, but the method that he has adopted – air strikes – will not do the job. Therefore, Obama has pushed the actual hour of defeat to some hazy point in the distant future. How distant? John Kerry recently said that it would take three years to defeat IS. In other words, Obama has decided to hand off the last and decisive stage of the war – the part where we actually win – to the next administration.

It would be uncharitable to call the new policy a head fake. Obama has definitely changed course in very real and significant way. However, it is also true that he has yet to overcome his reluctance to define what victory would look like and to develop a strategy that will actually achieve it. Keeping the Middle East at arm’s length remains the defining characteristic of his policy.

ISIS establishes a jihadist caliphate across Syria and Iraq. Iran pursues its nuclear ambitions. Syria remains mired in a terrible civil war, exacting a toll on the civilian population and region. In this podcast, Senior Fellow Michael Doran ( @doranimated) offers his views on these and related developments, the Obama administration’s response to them, and what he believes is the “great white whale” of President Obama’s Middle East strategy. Although he says that Obama’s initiatives in the region have failed, he explains what the president can do to put together a coalition of like-minded powers to act as a counterweight to the ISIS threat.

Doran also offers candid thoughts about why “academia is a profoundly conformist place,” how he made the transition from that world to government and then to a think tank, and why he wanted to be a Middle East scholar in the first place.

Authors

ISIS establishes a jihadist caliphate across Syria and Iraq. Iran pursues its nuclear ambitions. Syria remains mired in a terrible civil war, exacting a toll on the civilian population and region. In this podcast, Senior Fellow Michael Doran ( @doranimated) offers his views on these and related developments, the Obama administration’s response to them, and what he believes is the “great white whale” of President Obama’s Middle East strategy. Although he says that Obama’s initiatives in the region have failed, he explains what the president can do to put together a coalition of like-minded powers to act as a counterweight to the ISIS threat.

Doran also offers candid thoughts about why “academia is a profoundly conformist place,” how he made the transition from that world to government and then to a think tank, and why he wanted to be a Middle East scholar in the first place.

On Friday July 25, as war raged in Gaza, John Kerry delivered a draft ceasefire agreement to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who then presented it to his security cabinet for consideration. Because the proposal granted Hamas a significant political victory—acquiescing, up front, in a number of the terrorist group’s key demands while failing even to mention Israel’s two primary concerns of infiltration tunnels and rockets—the ministers unanimously rejected it.

When unnamed officials leaked the document to Israel’s habitually left-leaning press, along with an account of the government’s thinking, a firestorm of indignation erupted—not, however, at Netanyahu but at the American Secretary of State. The views of one highly respected journalist were typical. Kerry’s proposal, he wrote, “raises serious doubts over his judgment. . . . It’s as if he isn’t the foreign minister of the world’s most powerful nation but an alien who just disembarked his spaceship in the Middle East.”

The journalist in question, Barak Ravid, is the diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, the flagship publication of the Israeli Left. Remarkably, Ravid was not alone among his colleagues. Some of the most vituperative attacks on Kerry came from critics of Netanyahu—columnists and others who regard the prime minister’s support for Israeli settlements as the greatest impediment to peace with the Palestinians.

What accounts for this unprecedented show of unanimity? Wartime solidarity, in part—but only in part. No less dismaying to the Israeli Left was the way Kerry’s proposal shunted aside both Egypt and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in a mad rush to embrace Hamas, Turkey, and Qatar as trusted interlocutors. In the eyes of Israeli leftists, the PA and Egypt are essential to a two-state solution of the conflict with the Palestinians, and any proposal that diminishes their standing is ignorant and misguided.

“It’s not clear what Kerry was thinking,” Ravid wrote. Indeed, Kerry’s Israeli critics assumed that he was not thinking at all. One commentator accused him of a “rookie mistake.” But this evaluation assigns responsibility to the wrong man, and incorrectly identifies the nature of the miscalculation. The true architect of the fiasco was not Kerry but President Obama, and the blunder was no tactical mishap. Rather, it was the logical product of a grand strategy, and fits seamlessly into an unmistakably broad pattern.

All across the Middle East, the traditional allies of the United States, just like the Israeli Left, feel that Obama has betrayed them. Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, Emiratis, and Turks, despite the very real differences among them, nurture grievances similar in kind to those expressed on the pages of Haaretz. Ravid’s question—“What was Kerry thinking?”—deserves to be recast. It would get closer to the heart of the matter to ask what the president was thinking.

The answer is as simple as it is surprising: the president is dreaming of an historical accommodation with Iran. The pursuit of that accommodation is the great white whale of Obama’s Middle East strategy, and capturing it is all that matters; everything else is insignificant by comparison. The goal looms so large as to influence every other facet of American policy, even so seemingly unrelated a matter as a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

During the latter decades of the cold war, American presidents developed a strong sense of “our team” and “their team” when it came to the Middle East. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, that attitude persisted—even as “their team” transformed itself from the Soviet camp into Iran’s so-called Resistance Alliance, which includes such otherwise disparate partners and proxies as Syria, Hizballah, and Hamas.

Obama has abandoned that conception entirely. To be sure, he still pays lip service to countering Iran’s malign influence in the region. But in practice, nothing could be farther from his mind. Last January, he offered what is undoubtedly a more accurate account of his thinking when he mused about Iran becoming a stabilizing force in the Middle East. “[I]f we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion,” he told David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, “you could see an equilibrium developing between . . . [Sunni] Gulf states and [Shiite] Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.”

Two key assumptions inform this line of reasoning. First, the president posits that Iran is now a defensive power. Holding on for dear life in the volatile Middle East, it has no sustained interest in undermining the United States, which might even serve as its ally in countering Sunni extremism. Second, Hamas and Hizballah are similarly defensive—and ready, under the right circumstances, to moderate their aggressive hostility.

In brief, President Obama now thinks of the region’s politics in terms of a roundtable. Everyone seated at it is potentially equal to everyone else, and the job of the United States is to narrow the gaps among antagonists in an effort to bring the system to the desired state of “equilibrium.” It was precisely this concept that informed American diplomacy over the Gaza ceasefire. Although the administration was quickly forced to backpedal and abandon its proposal in the face of opposition from Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, the incident illustrated starkly how its Ahab-like fixation on a grand bargain with Iran has created a culture that makes stiffing American allies just a normal part of doing business.

Is it necessary to point out that those allies see the politics of the region very differently? They envisage not a round table but, at best, a rectangular one, with their team sitting on one side and Iran and its proxies on the other. They expect the United States either to join their side or to tilt heavily in their favor.

They also see something else: the complex and multiform divisions on the ground that make the Middle East so challenging. In addition to the rift between Iran and its opponents, there also exists a rivalry between those states, preeminently Turkey and Qatar, that support the Muslim Brotherhood and those, preeminently Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that oppose it. Because Hamas is both an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and a proxy of Iran, these two rivalries have intersected in the Gaza war—which is why, in the eyes of Egyptian and Saudi leaders, Hamas represents a double threat. Even though the spectacle of a Jewish military victory over a Palestinian adversary is profoundly unpopular on their own streets, they are eager to see Israel crush that threat.

When John Kerry developed his ceasefire proposal, he largely ignored all this, and particularly the preferences of Riyadh and Cairo. Not only was he enhancing Hamas’s power and prestige but, through his courtship of Turkey and Qatar, he was also offering it a path out from under the thumb of the Egyptians. Still worse, Kerry’s proposal was a windfall for the Iranians, who have played an indispensable role in building Hamas’s military machine and who, even as Kerry was working to settle the conflict, egged Hamas on against Israel. Whether Kerry consciously intended to benefit Iran is immaterial. The roundtable approach to Middle East problems, the fruitless search for equilibrium, automatically works to Iran’s advantage.

No wonder, then, that Obama’s policies are in a shambles. It is impossible to succeed in the Middle East without partners, and so long as he remains bent on empowering Iran and its proxies (who, for their part, continue to make no secret of their loathing for the United States), America’s traditional allies will withhold their own support for Washington’s initiatives. This fact raises a question: when it finally becomes obvious not only that the president’s policy will never work but that it has, in fact, contributed to producing ever greater mayhem and carnage in the region, will he reverse field?

The answer is no. Early on his presidency, perhaps even before he was inaugurated, Obama resolved that he would be remembered in history for pulling the United States back from the Middle East—for ending wars, not starting them. The roundtable approach is his scenario for what should replace the American-led order of yesteryear. To admit that an equilibrium with Iran is a chimera—and that instead of ending wars he has helped prolong and multiply them—would be tantamount to renouncing his cherished legacy.

The president has already displayed an extremely high tolerance for turmoil in the Middle East, and he will display an even higher one before entertaining the notion that his strategy is profoundly misconceived. “Apparently,” Obama said in a recent press conference, “people have forgotten that America, as the most powerful country on earth, still does not control everything around the world, and so our diplomatic efforts often take time. They often will see progress and then a step backward. That’s been true in the Middle East.”

Our current step backward will undoubtedly last for at least two more years—at untold cost to the region, to us, and to “our team.” As Libya crumbles, Syria and Gaza burn, and the “caliphate” leaves a trail of headless corpses from Baghdad to Damascus, more rivers of blood will flow. America’s allies are on their own.

Authors

On Friday July 25, as war raged in Gaza, John Kerry delivered a draft ceasefire agreement to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who then presented it to his security cabinet for consideration. Because the proposal granted Hamas a significant political victory—acquiescing, up front, in a number of the terrorist group’s key demands while failing even to mention Israel’s two primary concerns of infiltration tunnels and rockets—the ministers unanimously rejected it.

When unnamed officials leaked the document to Israel’s habitually left-leaning press, along with an account of the government’s thinking, a firestorm of indignation erupted—not, however, at Netanyahu but at the American Secretary of State. The views of one highly respected journalist were typical. Kerry’s proposal, he wrote, “raises serious doubts over his judgment. . . . It’s as if he isn’t the foreign minister of the world’s most powerful nation but an alien who just disembarked his spaceship in the Middle East.”

The journalist in question, Barak Ravid, is the diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, the flagship publication of the Israeli Left. Remarkably, Ravid was not alone among his colleagues. Some of the most vituperative attacks on Kerry came from critics of Netanyahu—columnists and others who regard the prime minister’s support for Israeli settlements as the greatest impediment to peace with the Palestinians.

What accounts for this unprecedented show of unanimity? Wartime solidarity, in part—but only in part. No less dismaying to the Israeli Left was the way Kerry’s proposal shunted aside both Egypt and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in a mad rush to embrace Hamas, Turkey, and Qatar as trusted interlocutors. In the eyes of Israeli leftists, the PA and Egypt are essential to a two-state solution of the conflict with the Palestinians, and any proposal that diminishes their standing is ignorant and misguided.

“It’s not clear what Kerry was thinking,” Ravid wrote. Indeed, Kerry’s Israeli critics assumed that he was not thinking at all. One commentator accused him of a “rookie mistake.” But this evaluation assigns responsibility to the wrong man, and incorrectly identifies the nature of the miscalculation. The true architect of the fiasco was not Kerry but President Obama, and the blunder was no tactical mishap. Rather, it was the logical product of a grand strategy, and fits seamlessly into an unmistakably broad pattern.

All across the Middle East, the traditional allies of the United States, just like the Israeli Left, feel that Obama has betrayed them. Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, Emiratis, and Turks, despite the very real differences among them, nurture grievances similar in kind to those expressed on the pages of Haaretz. Ravid’s question—“What was Kerry thinking?”—deserves to be recast. It would get closer to the heart of the matter to ask what the president was thinking.

The answer is as simple as it is surprising: the president is dreaming of an historical accommodation with Iran. The pursuit of that accommodation is the great white whale of Obama’s Middle East strategy, and capturing it is all that matters; everything else is insignificant by comparison. The goal looms so large as to influence every other facet of American policy, even so seemingly unrelated a matter as a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

During the latter decades of the cold war, American presidents developed a strong sense of “our team” and “their team” when it came to the Middle East. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, that attitude persisted—even as “their team” transformed itself from the Soviet camp into Iran’s so-called Resistance Alliance, which includes such otherwise disparate partners and proxies as Syria, Hizballah, and Hamas.

Obama has abandoned that conception entirely. To be sure, he still pays lip service to countering Iran’s malign influence in the region. But in practice, nothing could be farther from his mind. Last January, he offered what is undoubtedly a more accurate account of his thinking when he mused about Iran becoming a stabilizing force in the Middle East. “[I]f we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion,” he told David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, “you could see an equilibrium developing between . . . [Sunni] Gulf states and [Shiite] Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.”

Two key assumptions inform this line of reasoning. First, the president posits that Iran is now a defensive power. Holding on for dear life in the volatile Middle East, it has no sustained interest in undermining the United States, which might even serve as its ally in countering Sunni extremism. Second, Hamas and Hizballah are similarly defensive—and ready, under the right circumstances, to moderate their aggressive hostility.

In brief, President Obama now thinks of the region’s politics in terms of a roundtable. Everyone seated at it is potentially equal to everyone else, and the job of the United States is to narrow the gaps among antagonists in an effort to bring the system to the desired state of “equilibrium.” It was precisely this concept that informed American diplomacy over the Gaza ceasefire. Although the administration was quickly forced to backpedal and abandon its proposal in the face of opposition from Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, the incident illustrated starkly how its Ahab-like fixation on a grand bargain with Iran has created a culture that makes stiffing American allies just a normal part of doing business.

Is it necessary to point out that those allies see the politics of the region very differently? They envisage not a round table but, at best, a rectangular one, with their team sitting on one side and Iran and its proxies on the other. They expect the United States either to join their side or to tilt heavily in their favor.

They also see something else: the complex and multiform divisions on the ground that make the Middle East so challenging. In addition to the rift between Iran and its opponents, there also exists a rivalry between those states, preeminently Turkey and Qatar, that support the Muslim Brotherhood and those, preeminently Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that oppose it. Because Hamas is both an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and a proxy of Iran, these two rivalries have intersected in the Gaza war—which is why, in the eyes of Egyptian and Saudi leaders, Hamas represents a double threat. Even though the spectacle of a Jewish military victory over a Palestinian adversary is profoundly unpopular on their own streets, they are eager to see Israel crush that threat.

When John Kerry developed his ceasefire proposal, he largely ignored all this, and particularly the preferences of Riyadh and Cairo. Not only was he enhancing Hamas’s power and prestige but, through his courtship of Turkey and Qatar, he was also offering it a path out from under the thumb of the Egyptians. Still worse, Kerry’s proposal was a windfall for the Iranians, who have played an indispensable role in building Hamas’s military machine and who, even as Kerry was working to settle the conflict, egged Hamas on against Israel. Whether Kerry consciously intended to benefit Iran is immaterial. The roundtable approach to Middle East problems, the fruitless search for equilibrium, automatically works to Iran’s advantage.

No wonder, then, that Obama’s policies are in a shambles. It is impossible to succeed in the Middle East without partners, and so long as he remains bent on empowering Iran and its proxies (who, for their part, continue to make no secret of their loathing for the United States), America’s traditional allies will withhold their own support for Washington’s initiatives. This fact raises a question: when it finally becomes obvious not only that the president’s policy will never work but that it has, in fact, contributed to producing ever greater mayhem and carnage in the region, will he reverse field?

The answer is no. Early on his presidency, perhaps even before he was inaugurated, Obama resolved that he would be remembered in history for pulling the United States back from the Middle East—for ending wars, not starting them. The roundtable approach is his scenario for what should replace the American-led order of yesteryear. To admit that an equilibrium with Iran is a chimera—and that instead of ending wars he has helped prolong and multiply them—would be tantamount to renouncing his cherished legacy.

The president has already displayed an extremely high tolerance for turmoil in the Middle East, and he will display an even higher one before entertaining the notion that his strategy is profoundly misconceived. “Apparently,” Obama said in a recent press conference, “people have forgotten that America, as the most powerful country on earth, still does not control everything around the world, and so our diplomatic efforts often take time. They often will see progress and then a step backward. That’s been true in the Middle East.”

Our current step backward will undoubtedly last for at least two more years—at untold cost to the region, to us, and to “our team.” As Libya crumbles, Syria and Gaza burn, and the “caliphate” leaves a trail of headless corpses from Baghdad to Damascus, more rivers of blood will flow. America’s allies are on their own.

Authors

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http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2014/07/25-around-the-halls-gaza?rssid=doranm{0CF9AB7A-8EC6-4409-9D6E-4B3E0CE79670}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/70417393/0/brookingsrss/experts/doranm~Around-the-Halls-The-Crisis-in-Gaza-DeepensAround the Halls: The Crisis in Gaza Deepens

When Daniel Byman emailed his latest piece on the current situation in Gaza to his colleagues, he ignited up a lively conversation and debate among the experts at the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. Below is an edited version of their conversation.

Khaled Elgindy, Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
Great piece, Dan. So, if the goal is to convince the other side that attacks on Israel “are too costly to carry out,” than disproportionality is by definition intended to maximize rather than minimize the harm to the other side. In which case, doesn’t that also mean that the enormous civilian casualty rate ( about 75 percent) is on some level intentional?

Daniel Byman, Senior Fellow and Director of Research, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
My sense (and here I'll defer to Natan) is that the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) gets and gives somewhat contradictory orders on this. There is both a strong and formal "when possible, try to avoid killing civilians" order, but also a message of "show them we mean business" and, of course, "protect the troops at all cost" (which can mean you bring down the building rather than try to clear it room by room to avoid civilians). So I think Israel often tries to do both proportionality and deterrence, and as a result both suffer.

Natan Sachs, Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
As you point out, Dan, I think the main difference is between the tactical and the operational levels. Israeli troops, as a rule, do not try to kill civilians, contra frequent accusations in social media and in the press, but the Israeli operation as a whole is not as sensitive to civilian casualties as it might be. From the Hamas side, of course, civilian casualties are the point, though in this round they have so far succeeded mostly in producing Palestinian civilian casualties.

On the tactical level, the Israeli standing orders are very clear – rehearsed by every soldier from day one – and they are to avoid civilian casualties when possible. This includes routine procedures for encounters and especially for airstrikes, many of which are canceled if the pilot or other visual intel identifies bystanders. There are now also actual lawyers in the forward war room for some operations. That’s of course much harder to do with infantry in actual combat, where their own lives are more at risk and they necessarily have to be more cautious, which can mean more aggressive measures in combat. Similar dilemmas are faced by American troops in asymmetric warfare.

But “when possible” of course depends on the setting, the orders, and the spirit of the orders from above. In the Hamas/Gaza case, where it is both harder to avoid civilians, and where the enemy is intent on causing civilians casualties even among the people it rules, it is very different than in others. With a mission that is vaguely defined by the high command, especially, it can entail less caution among the troops.

On the operational level, however, the Israeli decision to push on is also motivated by the desire to project strength and to deter Hamas, as you point out, Dan. As you also point out, this is complicated by Israel’s acute sensitivity to its own casualties, and especially POWs (prisoners of war), which weakens its hand in the game of chicken you describe, which in turn produces less sensitivity to civilian casualties on the other side.

As I've noted elsewhere, however, the focus on the Israeli decisions alone is a bad mistake in my view. Palestinians, contrary to the tone of many Palestinian politicians and commentators, have agency: they too can shape the course of events. That this conflict, with all the complications that the arena poses, would entail such tragic consequences was known to Hamas as well as to Israel. I'm not surprised by Palestinian rage toward Israel at the moment, and Israel could have done things far better; I am dismayed by the lack of Palestinian rage toward Hamas.

Tamara Cofman Wittes, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
The demonstrations Friday in Jerusalem and the West Bank suggest that we might now be heading down an even darker road. If a cease-fire takes three more days, as some reports suggest, I hope that won’t be too late.

Salman Shaikh, Director, Brookings Doha Center and Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
With the West Bank protests starting up and lives being lost, I suspect that it will take some doing (even for Qatar and Turkey) to get Hamas to agree to any ceasefire proposal in the next few days. They are more popular in the West Bank than Abbas (and even Gaza), especially now. At a minimum, they will drive an even harder bargain.

Michael Doran, Senior Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
Not sure the Israelis will go all the way, but they'll proceed to its outskirts.

Khaled Elgindy:
Just so I'm clear, what exactly is "all the way"?

Michael Doran:
Re-occupation and effort to topple Hamas.

That being said, I think Netanyahu will come out in “okay” shape. Hamas will be the loser. Lots of variables, but that's my prediction. You can all ridicule me if I'm wrong. But if I am right, I reserve the right to be insufferable for a week.

Shadi Hamid, Fellow, Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
When you say Hamas will end up the loser, how do you define "lose"? Seems like they have more going for them right now, especially with developments in the West Bank (AWRAD's just released poll of West Bankers has mostly good news for Hamas). Of course, a lot will depend on the eventual ceasefire terms, but I'm just curious how we make the assessment of Hamas's success or failure in the coming weeks/months.

Michael Doran:
As for Shadi's question, about what “lose” means, it's not an easy question, because Hamas will probably stay in power in Gaza. Rooting them out is too difficult for anyone to take on. Even if Netanyahu's war aims expand beyond destroying tunnels to significantly degrading Hamas, I doubt he will go for broke and try to topple it entirely. Doing so would require occupying a hostile population for a very long time. So the mere fact of surviving will give Hamas the ability to claim victory, like so many Arab leaders have done in the past after taking their people into fruitless wars. Some western academics and apologists will echo Hamas's claims of "divine victory," to borrow a phrase from Nasrallah in 2006, but having the professors on your side is hardly a pride-worthy distinction.

Hamas looks strong now, because of the surge of public opinion in its favor. But that is transitory. After the dust settles, even Palestinian public opinion will not support Hamas at renewed levels. Six months from now, many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, will ask themselves what all the pain and destruction that Hamas brought down on them was worth. Their disgruntlement will not weaken Hamas's grip on power, because it is a dictatorship supported by foreign money. But the organization, as it stands before its people and lectures them on the need for more sacrifice, will surely clock the sullen faces that stare blankly back. As for the "support" that Hamas gets from public opinion in other parts of the Arab world that will certainly dissipate. Of course, it's never been worth much anyway, throughout modern Arab history, because it never translates into lasting change in the behavior of states, the true power brokers in the region.

Meanwhile, Hamas will have lost considerably on the battlefield. Its extensive tunnel network will have been destroyed, and it will have lost many fighters. Its capabilities will be so degraded that it will take years to rebuild. And the reconstruction will take place in more difficult conditions, given that Hamas is now surrounded by a vice in the form of the Egyptian-Israeli alliance.

On top of all that, the world is about to notice something surprising. The United States is not as engaged and as influential as it was in the past, and, here's the surprising bit: that fact translates into very bad news for Palestinian nationalists. The mechanism by which the world constrained Israel was America. While that mechanism is not entirely gone, it is weak. Increasingly, Israel is going to look after its self-defense according to its own lights. Hamas's answer to that challenge is not an answer at all, and if it persists, it will only succeed in bringing down untold suffering on its own people.

So I am defining "loss" as a massive sacrifice, both by the organization and the people over whom it rules, in return for less than nothing.

Shadi Hamid:
Even if Hamas "loses" in the ways that you describe, it seems to me that they're likely to at least be better off than they were before the conflict started. It's hard to envision any ceasefire arrangement that won't include easing the blockade in some way (Hamas has little incentive to agree to a ceasefire that doesn't alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza). The West Bank surge in pro-Hamas sentiment isn't just about public opinion; it's about closing the gap between Hamas and Fatah. If the developments in the West Bank underscore anything, it's the real, and growing, desire for Palestinian unity. Last week on MSNBC, Mustafa Barghouti said that a new uprising had started. He may be getting ahead of himself, but if a ceasefire doesn't hold in the coming days, there will be more instability in the West Bank (and corresponding anti-Palestinian sentiment) and that can only strengthen Hamas hand during post-ceasefire negotiations over contours of unity government. Also, the expectation, which I suppose is implicit in these Israeli deterrence operations, is that at some point Palestinians will blame Hamas more than they blame Israel. But, there's little to suggest this is how most Palestinians process the results of Israeli military operations.

Michael Doran:
Concessions on easing the blockade are largely symbolic, because, when all is said and done, Egypt and Israel control the exits. Also, the Israelis and Egyptians, in my view, are going to make sure that this ends on terms that are advantageous to them. It will either end, therefore, with a ceasefire agreement close to the one the Egyptians offered Hamas up front, or it will end without any formal agreement. Hamas will simply begin holding its fire and Israel will pull back unilaterally. Hamas will claim that it never buckled and Israel will get the quiet it craves. As for Palestinian unity, I wouldn’t hold my breath. It has never existed in the past, and this conflict won’t bring it about. I’m sure that Palestinians blame Israel bitterly, much more than they blame Hamas. But hatred is not a sound basis for national unity. Gaza and the West Bank are on different historical trajectories, and this conflict is not going to change that basic fact. On the contrary.

And as for hating Israel more than Hamas, I’d add this footnote: I’m willing to bet that for some significant minority of Gazans – how big a segment I can only guess – one of the things that they hold against Israel is the fact that it, as they see it, placed Hamas in power over them. I could be wrong. I’ve never been to Gaza and maybe the people there are made of something I have never seen before. But elsewhere in the Middle East, as you well know, that’s the kind of thing one often hears, about Israel and America, when people complain about the dictators ruling over them.

Regarding the notion that the Gazans will reserve their rage exclusively for the Israelis, see Anne Barnard's piece. Even if Hamas only "urged" the residents of Shuja'iyya to stay put and did nothing to discipline those who did not heed the advice, I would guess that those who lost family members in the bombing did not come away from the experience with warm feelings for the Resistance. As I say, I'm not building on that one bit. I don't believe that public opinion matters much. The people of Gaza will probably have no choice after the war but to express their undying loyalty to Hamas. But I also don't assume that the words that they say out loud have much relationship to the actual feelings in their hearts.

Salman Shaikh:
As someone who has lived in Gaza, travelled there frequently (though not since 2011), I would say that Hamas's popularity wanes when: a) it is unable to provide services (a symptom of a persistent monthly budget deficit and related, and the siege), b) its social and political authoritarian tendencies exhibit themselves (a source of real irritation among Gazans) and c) because it too is seen as being corrupt (that is what happened when the old Gaza elite was replaced by a new business elite synonymous with the tunnel economy). I would be surprised if its popularity wanes during or at the end of this conflict, though this could depend on who takes the credit for lifting the siege (Abbas or Hamas).

Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy and Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and Director, Intelligence Project, Foreign Policy Program:
The history of air warfare is actually very simple: if you terrorize the target (Rotterdam) quickly they fold. If you don't, the civilian population rallies behind the regime for the duration (London, Berlin, Hanoi).

When Daniel Byman emailed his latest piece on the current situation in Gaza to his colleagues, he ignited up a lively conversation and debate among the experts at the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. Below is an edited version of their conversation.

Khaled Elgindy, Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
Great piece, Dan. So, if the goal is to convince the other side that attacks on Israel “are too costly to carry out,” than disproportionality is by definition intended to maximize rather than minimize the harm to the other side. In which case, doesn’t that also mean that the enormous civilian casualty rate ( about 75 percent) is on some level intentional?

Daniel Byman, Senior Fellow and Director of Research, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
My sense (and here I'll defer to Natan) is that the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) gets and gives somewhat contradictory orders on this. There is both a strong and formal "when possible, try to avoid killing civilians" order, but also a message of "show them we mean business" and, of course, "protect the troops at all cost" (which can mean you bring down the building rather than try to clear it room by room to avoid civilians). So I think Israel often tries to do both proportionality and deterrence, and as a result both suffer.

Natan Sachs, Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
As you point out, Dan, I think the main difference is between the tactical and the operational levels. Israeli troops, as a rule, do not try to kill civilians, contra frequent accusations in social media and in the press, but the Israeli operation as a whole is not as sensitive to civilian casualties as it might be. From the Hamas side, of course, civilian casualties are the point, though in this round they have so far succeeded mostly in producing Palestinian civilian casualties.

On the tactical level, the Israeli standing orders are very clear – rehearsed by every soldier from day one – and they are to avoid civilian casualties when possible. This includes routine procedures for encounters and especially for airstrikes, many of which are canceled if the pilot or other visual intel identifies bystanders. There are now also actual lawyers in the forward war room for some operations. That’s of course much harder to do with infantry in actual combat, where their own lives are more at risk and they necessarily have to be more cautious, which can mean more aggressive measures in combat. Similar dilemmas are faced by American troops in asymmetric warfare.

But “when possible” of course depends on the setting, the orders, and the spirit of the orders from above. In the Hamas/Gaza case, where it is both harder to avoid civilians, and where the enemy is intent on causing civilians casualties even among the people it rules, it is very different than in others. With a mission that is vaguely defined by the high command, especially, it can entail less caution among the troops.

On the operational level, however, the Israeli decision to push on is also motivated by the desire to project strength and to deter Hamas, as you point out, Dan. As you also point out, this is complicated by Israel’s acute sensitivity to its own casualties, and especially POWs (prisoners of war), which weakens its hand in the game of chicken you describe, which in turn produces less sensitivity to civilian casualties on the other side.

As I've noted elsewhere, however, the focus on the Israeli decisions alone is a bad mistake in my view. Palestinians, contrary to the tone of many Palestinian politicians and commentators, have agency: they too can shape the course of events. That this conflict, with all the complications that the arena poses, would entail such tragic consequences was known to Hamas as well as to Israel. I'm not surprised by Palestinian rage toward Israel at the moment, and Israel could have done things far better; I am dismayed by the lack of Palestinian rage toward Hamas.

Tamara Cofman Wittes, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
The demonstrations Friday in Jerusalem and the West Bank suggest that we might now be heading down an even darker road. If a cease-fire takes three more days, as some reports suggest, I hope that won’t be too late.

Salman Shaikh, Director, Brookings Doha Center and Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
With the West Bank protests starting up and lives being lost, I suspect that it will take some doing (even for Qatar and Turkey) to get Hamas to agree to any ceasefire proposal in the next few days. They are more popular in the West Bank than Abbas (and even Gaza), especially now. At a minimum, they will drive an even harder bargain.

Michael Doran, Senior Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
Not sure the Israelis will go all the way, but they'll proceed to its outskirts.

Khaled Elgindy:
Just so I'm clear, what exactly is "all the way"?

Michael Doran:
Re-occupation and effort to topple Hamas.

That being said, I think Netanyahu will come out in “okay” shape. Hamas will be the loser. Lots of variables, but that's my prediction. You can all ridicule me if I'm wrong. But if I am right, I reserve the right to be insufferable for a week.

Shadi Hamid, Fellow, Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy Program:
When you say Hamas will end up the loser, how do you define "lose"? Seems like they have more going for them right now, especially with developments in the West Bank (AWRAD's just released poll of West Bankers has mostly good news for Hamas). Of course, a lot will depend on the eventual ceasefire terms, but I'm just curious how we make the assessment of Hamas's success or failure in the coming weeks/months.

Michael Doran:
As for Shadi's question, about what “lose” means, it's not an easy question, because Hamas will probably stay in power in Gaza. Rooting them out is too difficult for anyone to take on. Even if Netanyahu's war aims expand beyond destroying tunnels to significantly degrading Hamas, I doubt he will go for broke and try to topple it entirely. Doing so would require occupying a hostile population for a very long time. So the mere fact of surviving will give Hamas the ability to claim victory, like so many Arab leaders have done in the past after taking their people into fruitless wars. Some western academics and apologists will echo Hamas's claims of "divine victory," to borrow a phrase from Nasrallah in 2006, but having the professors on your side is hardly a pride-worthy distinction.

Hamas looks strong now, because of the surge of public opinion in its favor. But that is transitory. After the dust settles, even Palestinian public opinion will not support Hamas at renewed levels. Six months from now, many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, will ask themselves what all the pain and destruction that Hamas brought down on them was worth. Their disgruntlement will not weaken Hamas's grip on power, because it is a dictatorship supported by foreign money. But the organization, as it stands before its people and lectures them on the need for more sacrifice, will surely clock the sullen faces that stare blankly back. As for the "support" that Hamas gets from public opinion in other parts of the Arab world that will certainly dissipate. Of course, it's never been worth much anyway, throughout modern Arab history, because it never translates into lasting change in the behavior of states, the true power brokers in the region.

Meanwhile, Hamas will have lost considerably on the battlefield. Its extensive tunnel network will have been destroyed, and it will have lost many fighters. Its capabilities will be so degraded that it will take years to rebuild. And the reconstruction will take place in more difficult conditions, given that Hamas is now surrounded by a vice in the form of the Egyptian-Israeli alliance.

On top of all that, the world is about to notice something surprising. The United States is not as engaged and as influential as it was in the past, and, here's the surprising bit: that fact translates into very bad news for Palestinian nationalists. The mechanism by which the world constrained Israel was America. While that mechanism is not entirely gone, it is weak. Increasingly, Israel is going to look after its self-defense according to its own lights. Hamas's answer to that challenge is not an answer at all, and if it persists, it will only succeed in bringing down untold suffering on its own people.

So I am defining "loss" as a massive sacrifice, both by the organization and the people over whom it rules, in return for less than nothing.

Shadi Hamid:
Even if Hamas "loses" in the ways that you describe, it seems to me that they're likely to at least be better off than they were before the conflict started. It's hard to envision any ceasefire arrangement that won't include easing the blockade in some way (Hamas has little incentive to agree to a ceasefire that doesn't alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza). The West Bank surge in pro-Hamas sentiment isn't just about public opinion; it's about closing the gap between Hamas and Fatah. If the developments in the West Bank underscore anything, it's the real, and growing, desire for Palestinian unity. Last week on MSNBC, Mustafa Barghouti said that a new uprising had started. He may be getting ahead of himself, but if a ceasefire doesn't hold in the coming days, there will be more instability in the West Bank (and corresponding anti-Palestinian sentiment) and that can only strengthen Hamas hand during post-ceasefire negotiations over contours of unity government. Also, the expectation, which I suppose is implicit in these Israeli deterrence operations, is that at some point Palestinians will blame Hamas more than they blame Israel. But, there's little to suggest this is how most Palestinians process the results of Israeli military operations.

Michael Doran:
Concessions on easing the blockade are largely symbolic, because, when all is said and done, Egypt and Israel control the exits. Also, the Israelis and Egyptians, in my view, are going to make sure that this ends on terms that are advantageous to them. It will either end, therefore, with a ceasefire agreement close to the one the Egyptians offered Hamas up front, or it will end without any formal agreement. Hamas will simply begin holding its fire and Israel will pull back unilaterally. Hamas will claim that it never buckled and Israel will get the quiet it craves. As for Palestinian unity, I wouldn’t hold my breath. It has never existed in the past, and this conflict won’t bring it about. I’m sure that Palestinians blame Israel bitterly, much more than they blame Hamas. But hatred is not a sound basis for national unity. Gaza and the West Bank are on different historical trajectories, and this conflict is not going to change that basic fact. On the contrary.

And as for hating Israel more than Hamas, I’d add this footnote: I’m willing to bet that for some significant minority of Gazans – how big a segment I can only guess – one of the things that they hold against Israel is the fact that it, as they see it, placed Hamas in power over them. I could be wrong. I’ve never been to Gaza and maybe the people there are made of something I have never seen before. But elsewhere in the Middle East, as you well know, that’s the kind of thing one often hears, about Israel and America, when people complain about the dictators ruling over them.

Regarding the notion that the Gazans will reserve their rage exclusively for the Israelis, see Anne Barnard's piece. Even if Hamas only "urged" the residents of Shuja'iyya to stay put and did nothing to discipline those who did not heed the advice, I would guess that those who lost family members in the bombing did not come away from the experience with warm feelings for the Resistance. As I say, I'm not building on that one bit. I don't believe that public opinion matters much. The people of Gaza will probably have no choice after the war but to express their undying loyalty to Hamas. But I also don't assume that the words that they say out loud have much relationship to the actual feelings in their hearts.

Salman Shaikh:
As someone who has lived in Gaza, travelled there frequently (though not since 2011), I would say that Hamas's popularity wanes when: a) it is unable to provide services (a symptom of a persistent monthly budget deficit and related, and the siege), b) its social and political authoritarian tendencies exhibit themselves (a source of real irritation among Gazans) and c) because it too is seen as being corrupt (that is what happened when the old Gaza elite was replaced by a new business elite synonymous with the tunnel economy). I would be surprised if its popularity wanes during or at the end of this conflict, though this could depend on who takes the credit for lifting the siege (Abbas or Hamas).

Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy and Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and Director, Intelligence Project, Foreign Policy Program:
The history of air warfare is actually very simple: if you terrorize the target (Rotterdam) quickly they fold. If you don't, the civilian population rallies behind the regime for the duration (London, Berlin, Hanoi).

Three distinguished former U.S. ambassadors, Ryan Crocker, William Luers, and Thomas Pickering (a Brookings Distinguished Fellow) took to the pages of The Washington Postlast Saturday to warn President Obama against walking away from the negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program. Reaching an agreement in Vienna, they argue, is the key to unlocking a regional partnership with Iran and its ally, Syria. The ambassadors, however, would do well to remember the Arab proverb that says, "al-hamiya haramiya" — "the guardian is the thief." For years Iran has been stealing from the United States and its allies; now, suddenly, it is presenting itself as the guardian of their interests.

In embracing Iran as a partner of the United States, Crocker, Luers, and Pickering make three analytical errors. First, they mistakenly claim that "the breakup of Iraq and the creation of a radical Islamist Sunni state next door would be catastrophic" for Iran. This is an overstatement. It was the grueling Iran-Iraq war that forged the perspective of the ruling elite in Tehran. That conflict, which lasted eight years and brought the regime to the brink of ruin, taught the guardians of the Islamic Republic the dangers of a powerful and united Iraq, which they prefer to see weak and divided.

This is not to say that they welcome the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) with open arms. The appearance of the caliphate is a severe headache for Tehran, but it also brings a number of benefits. For one thing, it forces the Maliki government in Baghdad into an ever-greater dependency on Tehran. And, for another, it prompts influential figures in Washington to lobby President Obama in favor of not just of abandoning the traditional American policy of containing Iran, but also of taking a more flexible position in the nuclear negotiations. In other words, the very existence of the op-ed by Crocker, Luers, and Pickering is Exhibit "A" for the case against their own argument.

The second error of the three ambassadors is to blame "the Persian Gulf monarchies" for "clandestinely supporting radical Islam." This is a serious allegation — one that requires far more evidence and greater specificity than the authors offer. Which monarchies are they indicting? To which representatives of "radical Islam" are they referring? Are they suggesting, for example, that ISIS is a client organization of Saudi Arabia?

To be sure, money from the Gulf has been making its way to Islamist organizations in Syria and Iraq. But the primary sources of this funding are Islamic charities supported by wealthy individuals, not governments. Moreover, that money is a drop in the bucket compared to the million dollars a day that, according to credible reports, ISIS receives from oil sales to Turkey and Iran.

You heard that right: Iran. Indeed, the ambassadors' accusation against the Gulf monarchies entirely ignores the role that Tehran and Damascus have played in building up ISIS — a role that extends well beyond the purchase of oil. ISIS is the latest emanation of what used to be called al-Qaeda in Iraq . In March 2010, General Petraeus, then the commander of U.S. Central Command, testified before Congress that Iran was aiding al-Qaeda, allowing its territory to be used as a "key facilitation hub, where facilitators connect al-Qaeda’s senior leadership to regional affiliates." For its part, the Assad regime permitted the free flow of suicide bombers to al-Qaeda in Iraq for years. When all is said and done, Iran and Syria have played a far more pernicious role in the rise of ISIS than have the Gulf monarchies.

The ambassadors' third error is to accept at face value the arguments of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who whispers in the ear of Secretary of State John Kerry that conciliatory gestures by the United States will strengthen moderate forces in the Iranian elite. But the exact opposite is more likely the case. American concessions breed contempt from men like Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force. Soleimani is a close confidant of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and, unlike the ubiquitous Zarif, plays a determinative role in Iranian policy toward Iraq and Syria. The very significant concessions that President Obama has already made to Iran have given the likes of Soleimani the basis to argue that the Americans are retreating from the Middle East, and that, therefore, striving to comprise with them is both unwise and unnecessary.

But Crocker and his colleagues advocate for yet more American concessions. Their position calls to mind another Arab proverb: "Yalli bi jarrib mjarrab, 'aqloh mkharrab" – a saying roughly equivalent to the old adage, often attributed to Einstein, which defines insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result."

To get a truly desirable outcome, President Obama should take a reasonable but unmovable position in the nuclear negotiations in Vienna. If the Iranians balk, then he should walk away and reappraise his approach. The time has come to halt the American retreat from the Middle East.

Authors

Three distinguished former U.S. ambassadors, Ryan Crocker, William Luers, and Thomas Pickering (a Brookings Distinguished Fellow) took to the pages of The Washington Postlast Saturday to warn President Obama against walking away from the negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program. Reaching an agreement in Vienna, they argue, is the key to unlocking a regional partnership with Iran and its ally, Syria. The ambassadors, however, would do well to remember the Arab proverb that says, "al-hamiya haramiya" — "the guardian is the thief." For years Iran has been stealing from the United States and its allies; now, suddenly, it is presenting itself as the guardian of their interests.

In embracing Iran as a partner of the United States, Crocker, Luers, and Pickering make three analytical errors. First, they mistakenly claim that "the breakup of Iraq and the creation of a radical Islamist Sunni state next door would be catastrophic" for Iran. This is an overstatement. It was the grueling Iran-Iraq war that forged the perspective of the ruling elite in Tehran. That conflict, which lasted eight years and brought the regime to the brink of ruin, taught the guardians of the Islamic Republic the dangers of a powerful and united Iraq, which they prefer to see weak and divided.

This is not to say that they welcome the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) with open arms. The appearance of the caliphate is a severe headache for Tehran, but it also brings a number of benefits. For one thing, it forces the Maliki government in Baghdad into an ever-greater dependency on Tehran. And, for another, it prompts influential figures in Washington to lobby President Obama in favor of not just of abandoning the traditional American policy of containing Iran, but also of taking a more flexible position in the nuclear negotiations. In other words, the very existence of the op-ed by Crocker, Luers, and Pickering is Exhibit "A" for the case against their own argument.

The second error of the three ambassadors is to blame "the Persian Gulf monarchies" for "clandestinely supporting radical Islam." This is a serious allegation — one that requires far more evidence and greater specificity than the authors offer. Which monarchies are they indicting? To which representatives of "radical Islam" are they referring? Are they suggesting, for example, that ISIS is a client organization of Saudi Arabia?

To be sure, money from the Gulf has been making its way to Islamist organizations in Syria and Iraq. But the primary sources of this funding are Islamic charities supported by wealthy individuals, not governments. Moreover, that money is a drop in the bucket compared to the million dollars a day that, according to credible reports, ISIS receives from oil sales to Turkey and Iran.

You heard that right: Iran. Indeed, the ambassadors' accusation against the Gulf monarchies entirely ignores the role that Tehran and Damascus have played in building up ISIS — a role that extends well beyond the purchase of oil. ISIS is the latest emanation of what used to be called al-Qaeda in Iraq . In March 2010, General Petraeus, then the commander of U.S. Central Command, testified before Congress that Iran was aiding al-Qaeda, allowing its territory to be used as a "key facilitation hub, where facilitators connect al-Qaeda’s senior leadership to regional affiliates." For its part, the Assad regime permitted the free flow of suicide bombers to al-Qaeda in Iraq for years. When all is said and done, Iran and Syria have played a far more pernicious role in the rise of ISIS than have the Gulf monarchies.

The ambassadors' third error is to accept at face value the arguments of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who whispers in the ear of Secretary of State John Kerry that conciliatory gestures by the United States will strengthen moderate forces in the Iranian elite. But the exact opposite is more likely the case. American concessions breed contempt from men like Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force. Soleimani is a close confidant of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and, unlike the ubiquitous Zarif, plays a determinative role in Iranian policy toward Iraq and Syria. The very significant concessions that President Obama has already made to Iran have given the likes of Soleimani the basis to argue that the Americans are retreating from the Middle East, and that, therefore, striving to comprise with them is both unwise and unnecessary.

But Crocker and his colleagues advocate for yet more American concessions. Their position calls to mind another Arab proverb: "Yalli bi jarrib mjarrab, 'aqloh mkharrab" – a saying roughly equivalent to the old adage, often attributed to Einstein, which defines insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result."

To get a truly desirable outcome, President Obama should take a reasonable but unmovable position in the nuclear negotiations in Vienna. If the Iranians balk, then he should walk away and reappraise his approach. The time has come to halt the American retreat from the Middle East.

Authors

]]>
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2014/07/10-doran-obama-iraq-syria-strategy?rssid=doranm{5EC0EC13-0D5B-425B-8C77-3C4F59B8F414}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/80154752/0/brookingsrss/experts/doranm~Misidentifying-the-Conflict-in-Iraq-and-SyriaMisidentifying the Conflict in Iraq and Syria

With the June 10 capture of the city of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a debate promptly reopened in the American media over America’s role in the fate of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. Typifying one side of the debate was former President Bill Clinton, who on network television laid the blame for today’s problems squarely on the shoulders of the Bush administration. “If they hadn’t gone to war in Iraq,” he said, “none of this would be happening.” On the other side, there are suggestions that President Obama’s neglect of Iraq has been at least as harmful as was the interventionism of his predecessor, if not more so.

But the Iraq war as we once knew it is no longer, and the debate over it leaves us mired unprofitably in the past. The rise of ISIS is a subset of a new conflict, one that stretches all the way from Baghdad to Beirut. That conflict has its own unique character. What is it about? Who are its primary participants? Where do America’s vital interests lie, and what should America’s strategy be?

The new war is, in brief, a struggle over the regional order. In the balance hangs the future shape of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon—their political shape no less than their contours on a map. On the battlefield at any given moment, one can find a dizzying array of actors, but at the basic strategic level the conflict has three sides: Shiite Iran and its proxies; ISIS and likeminded Sunni extremists; and the traditional allies of the United States: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel.

Which side is the United States on? Surprisingly, not the side of its traditional allies. Instead, Obama supports Iran. One can argue about whether this pro-Iran tilt is accidental or intentional, but one cannot deny its existence.

To see this picture clearly, we must ignore what the Obama administration says and focus on what it actually does. On Syria, for example, the White House continually repeats the tired line that we are working to convince President Bashar al-Assad to step aside and allow the opposition and the government to negotiate a caretaker authority. Yet who any longer gives any credence to this claim? It has long been clear that Washington wants and expects Assad to stay. Post-Mosul, the United States and its European allies even see the Syrian regime as a potential asset against ISIS.

What about the $500 million in support of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) that the administration has lately requested from Congress? Simply put, the purpose of that aid is to keep the beleaguered FSA on life support lest ISIS swallow it up. Even after having made the request, the administration has explicitly resisted providing the FSA with the kind of weapons and training it would need to change the local balance of power. Instead, the administration remains wedded to its policy of “preserving regime institutions”—a euphemism for Assad’s murder machine, which is thoroughly integrated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards—and turns a blind eye to the deployment in Syria of Iraqi Shiite and Hizballah militiamen supported by Tehran.

The upshot is that when the president says he opposes the presence of foreign fighters in Syria, he is referring exclusively to Sunni jihadis. He has given Shiites a pass.

This brings us to Iraq, where the alignment between Washington and Tehran is even more transparent. On June 16, President Obama sent up to 300 military advisers to Baghdad, while also increasing our intelligence operations; two weeks later, he augmented the force by nearly 200 soldiers, amid reports that they would fly Apache helicopters and deploy surveillance drones. Unfortunately, however, since the departure of American troops in 2011, the Shiite regime of Nouri al-Maliki has itself become a satellite of Iran, whose Revolutionary Guards have thoroughly penetrated Iraqi security services. For all intents and purposes, then, the American troopers dispatched to Iraq are working to harden Iranian defenses, since any intelligence that we share with Maliki’s security services will inevitably land on the desk in Tehran of Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force.

Where Iraq is concerned, the United States and Iran now resemble two men walking single file down the street, repeating the same messages to everyone they encounter. Their silent coordination was recently on clear display in Kurdistan. After the fall of Mosul, the Iranian government urged Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish regional government in Iraq, to fight ISIS and support the government in Baghdad. A few days later, John Kerry appeared in Erbil to deliver an identical message.

But the effort to build an anti-ISIS coalition with Iran will inevitably fail—and spectacularly so. There are many reasons why, but one deserves special attention: Iran is incapable of making it succeed. Consider: over the last three years, Obama gave Iran a free hand in Syria and Iraq to counter Sunni jihadism. The result is a revitalized Iranian alliance system—and an al-Qaeda safe haven that now stretches from the outskirts of Baghdad in Iraq to Aleppo in Syria.

Yet Tehran is less discomfited by that safe haven than the Obama administration appears to think. Lacking the capability to defeat ISIS militarily, it thinks instead of managing the conflict to its own advantage. Two benefits have already accrued. In the absence of a strong American effort to shape the new order, opponents of ISIS have almost nowhere to turn but Iran. At the same time, longstanding American hostility to Iranian regional adventures has all but evaporated.

On top of these obvious advantages, the Iranian leadership probably also calculates that, by pretending to be partners in counterterrorism with the West, it has magnified its leverage in the nuclear negotiations, which is Iran’s number one foreign-policy priority. This calculation may well be correct.

In any case, Iran and its allies lack not only the military capability to defeat Sunni jihadism but also the requisite political legitimacy. If the Iraq war taught us anything, it was that the defeat of al-Qaeda requires enlisting Sunni partners on our side. The best way to do that is to provide those civilian partners with a security regime they can trust. But today the non-jihadi Sunnis of Iraq and Syria fear both Maliki and Assad—who can blame them?—and have no reason to trust either America or Iran. In Iraq, the moment American troops departed, Maliki set to work shutting Sunnis out of the political system, without so much as a peep from Washington. In Syria, Assad has been savagely raping Sunni society. Iran, for its part, having directly aided both leaders in their respective sectarian projects, is toxic to Sunnis of all political stripes.

With counterterrorism partners like these, Obama has no chance of attracting reliable Sunni allies. Absent the positive vision of a future political order they would be willing to fight for, the FSA forces trained by the U.S. in Syria, who do not regard ISIS as their primary enemy, will melt away when confronted with opposition from that quarter. As for America’s traditional Muslim allies in the region—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey—they can be counted on for, at most, qualified support. Although ISIS poses a significant threat to their security, they will be reluctant to join a coalition destined to advance the interests of Iran and its allies.

For Carl von Clausewitz, the great theoretician of war, identifying a conflict’s “center of gravity” is of key importance. Herein lies “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything [in war] depends.” Obama’s strategy ignores the center of gravity in today’s war, which is the struggle against the Iranian alliance system. The heart of the battle today is in Syria, where Assad, Iran’s closest ally, presents the alliance at its most brutal, if also its most vulnerable. Until Assad is gone, Syria will remain the region’s most powerful magnet of global jihad. So long as the jihadis enjoy a safe haven in Syria, they will continue to dominate the Sunni heartland of Iraq.

When a state misidentifies the center of gravity, writes Clausewitz, its blows, no matter how hard, strike only air. President Obama is now winding up to throw a big punch at ISIS, but it will never connect. Regardless of his intentions, the effect of his policies is to deliver large portions of Iraq and Syria to ISIS while simultaneously empowering Iran.

This outcome bodes ill for the United States. But it will be especially dangerous for those countries that the U.S. used to call allies: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, to name just three. Israel is in particular peril. American policy is partitioning Syria between Iran and the global jihadis—the two worst enemies of the Jewish state, now digging in right across its northern border. There can be no happy ending to this story.

Authors

With the June 10 capture of the city of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a debate promptly reopened in the American media over America’s role in the fate of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. Typifying one side of the debate was former President Bill Clinton, who on network television laid the blame for today’s problems squarely on the shoulders of the Bush administration. “If they hadn’t gone to war in Iraq,” he said, “none of this would be happening.” On the other side, there are suggestions that President Obama’s neglect of Iraq has been at least as harmful as was the interventionism of his predecessor, if not more so.

But the Iraq war as we once knew it is no longer, and the debate over it leaves us mired unprofitably in the past. The rise of ISIS is a subset of a new conflict, one that stretches all the way from Baghdad to Beirut. That conflict has its own unique character. What is it about? Who are its primary participants? Where do America’s vital interests lie, and what should America’s strategy be?

The new war is, in brief, a struggle over the regional order. In the balance hangs the future shape of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon—their political shape no less than their contours on a map. On the battlefield at any given moment, one can find a dizzying array of actors, but at the basic strategic level the conflict has three sides: Shiite Iran and its proxies; ISIS and likeminded Sunni extremists; and the traditional allies of the United States: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel.

Which side is the United States on? Surprisingly, not the side of its traditional allies. Instead, Obama supports Iran. One can argue about whether this pro-Iran tilt is accidental or intentional, but one cannot deny its existence.

To see this picture clearly, we must ignore what the Obama administration says and focus on what it actually does. On Syria, for example, the White House continually repeats the tired line that we are working to convince President Bashar al-Assad to step aside and allow the opposition and the government to negotiate a caretaker authority. Yet who any longer gives any credence to this claim? It has long been clear that Washington wants and expects Assad to stay. Post-Mosul, the United States and its European allies even see the Syrian regime as a potential asset against ISIS.

What about the $500 million in support of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) that the administration has lately requested from Congress? Simply put, the purpose of that aid is to keep the beleaguered FSA on life support lest ISIS swallow it up. Even after having made the request, the administration has explicitly resisted providing the FSA with the kind of weapons and training it would need to change the local balance of power. Instead, the administration remains wedded to its policy of “preserving regime institutions”—a euphemism for Assad’s murder machine, which is thoroughly integrated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards—and turns a blind eye to the deployment in Syria of Iraqi Shiite and Hizballah militiamen supported by Tehran.

The upshot is that when the president says he opposes the presence of foreign fighters in Syria, he is referring exclusively to Sunni jihadis. He has given Shiites a pass.

This brings us to Iraq, where the alignment between Washington and Tehran is even more transparent. On June 16, President Obama sent up to 300 military advisers to Baghdad, while also increasing our intelligence operations; two weeks later, he augmented the force by nearly 200 soldiers, amid reports that they would fly Apache helicopters and deploy surveillance drones. Unfortunately, however, since the departure of American troops in 2011, the Shiite regime of Nouri al-Maliki has itself become a satellite of Iran, whose Revolutionary Guards have thoroughly penetrated Iraqi security services. For all intents and purposes, then, the American troopers dispatched to Iraq are working to harden Iranian defenses, since any intelligence that we share with Maliki’s security services will inevitably land on the desk in Tehran of Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force.

Where Iraq is concerned, the United States and Iran now resemble two men walking single file down the street, repeating the same messages to everyone they encounter. Their silent coordination was recently on clear display in Kurdistan. After the fall of Mosul, the Iranian government urged Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish regional government in Iraq, to fight ISIS and support the government in Baghdad. A few days later, John Kerry appeared in Erbil to deliver an identical message.

But the effort to build an anti-ISIS coalition with Iran will inevitably fail—and spectacularly so. There are many reasons why, but one deserves special attention: Iran is incapable of making it succeed. Consider: over the last three years, Obama gave Iran a free hand in Syria and Iraq to counter Sunni jihadism. The result is a revitalized Iranian alliance system—and an al-Qaeda safe haven that now stretches from the outskirts of Baghdad in Iraq to Aleppo in Syria.

Yet Tehran is less discomfited by that safe haven than the Obama administration appears to think. Lacking the capability to defeat ISIS militarily, it thinks instead of managing the conflict to its own advantage. Two benefits have already accrued. In the absence of a strong American effort to shape the new order, opponents of ISIS have almost nowhere to turn but Iran. At the same time, longstanding American hostility to Iranian regional adventures has all but evaporated.

On top of these obvious advantages, the Iranian leadership probably also calculates that, by pretending to be partners in counterterrorism with the West, it has magnified its leverage in the nuclear negotiations, which is Iran’s number one foreign-policy priority. This calculation may well be correct.

In any case, Iran and its allies lack not only the military capability to defeat Sunni jihadism but also the requisite political legitimacy. If the Iraq war taught us anything, it was that the defeat of al-Qaeda requires enlisting Sunni partners on our side. The best way to do that is to provide those civilian partners with a security regime they can trust. But today the non-jihadi Sunnis of Iraq and Syria fear both Maliki and Assad—who can blame them?—and have no reason to trust either America or Iran. In Iraq, the moment American troops departed, Maliki set to work shutting Sunnis out of the political system, without so much as a peep from Washington. In Syria, Assad has been savagely raping Sunni society. Iran, for its part, having directly aided both leaders in their respective sectarian projects, is toxic to Sunnis of all political stripes.

With counterterrorism partners like these, Obama has no chance of attracting reliable Sunni allies. Absent the positive vision of a future political order they would be willing to fight for, the FSA forces trained by the U.S. in Syria, who do not regard ISIS as their primary enemy, will melt away when confronted with opposition from that quarter. As for America’s traditional Muslim allies in the region—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey—they can be counted on for, at most, qualified support. Although ISIS poses a significant threat to their security, they will be reluctant to join a coalition destined to advance the interests of Iran and its allies.

For Carl von Clausewitz, the great theoretician of war, identifying a conflict’s “center of gravity” is of key importance. Herein lies “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything [in war] depends.” Obama’s strategy ignores the center of gravity in today’s war, which is the struggle against the Iranian alliance system. The heart of the battle today is in Syria, where Assad, Iran’s closest ally, presents the alliance at its most brutal, if also its most vulnerable. Until Assad is gone, Syria will remain the region’s most powerful magnet of global jihad. So long as the jihadis enjoy a safe haven in Syria, they will continue to dominate the Sunni heartland of Iraq.

When a state misidentifies the center of gravity, writes Clausewitz, its blows, no matter how hard, strike only air. President Obama is now winding up to throw a big punch at ISIS, but it will never connect. Regardless of his intentions, the effect of his policies is to deliver large portions of Iraq and Syria to ISIS while simultaneously empowering Iran.

This outcome bodes ill for the United States. But it will be especially dangerous for those countries that the U.S. used to call allies: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, to name just three. Israel is in particular peril. American policy is partitioning Syria between Iran and the global jihadis—the two worst enemies of the Jewish state, now digging in right across its northern border. There can be no happy ending to this story.

Authors

]]>
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2014/07/09-doran-obama-syria-iraq-two-step?rssid=doranm{0722DF1C-BB6A-4FCB-BE68-4E3A035B4BE0}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/80154753/0/brookingsrss/experts/doranm~Obama-and-the-Syria-TwoStepObama and the Syria Two-Step

An article that I published last week argued that President Obama is supporting Iran in Syria and Iraq, and that he is leaving America’s traditional allies and the Syrian opposition in the lurch. The article claimed that the president was being disingenuous when, in his commencement speech at West Point on May 28, he announced his intention “to ramp up support” for the Free Syria Army (FSA). That accusation deserves a more detailed explanation than I was able to provide in the body of the article itself.

On the surface the president’s new initiative looks impressive. After making his grand announcement in a major foreign policy speech, Obama turned to Congress with a request for $500 million to fund a new program to train and equip the FSA. For the first time the military, rather than the CIA, is to play a role in assisting Assad’s enemies. But a close look at the details of the request reveals a Potemkin structure.

The West Point initiative fits perfectly with what a well-established pattern of misdirection by the White House. Call it the Syria two-step. The president or a member of his administration issues a statement of support for the FSA that is long on pious intention but short on practical details. After gaining credit from the media for taking action, the president then quietly backs away from his own initiative, taking care never to admit that he is doing so.

In addition to this track record, there are three others reasons to believe that we are, once again, at the beginning of a new round of the two-step.

First, the West Point initiative, if it ever really materializes, will have no practical impact for at least a year, probably longer. Before the military can get to work, two pieces of legislation must pass Congress: an appropriations bill, which will fund the program, and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which will provide the military with the necessary authorities to involve itself in Syria. Given Congress’s schedule, the NDAA will not come up for a vote until after the midterm elections—not until December, possibly even January 2015. Even if the military rushes to work immediately after the passage of the bill, another six months to a year will elapse before American-trained FSA units can actually arrive on the battlefield. The earliest we could hope to see any impact is June 2015, and even that late date is probably unrealistic.

Second, no prior planning went into the initiative before Obama announced it—none whatsoever. The most basic questions have yet to be answered. Who is going to be trained? Which regional allies will help in the effort? Will FSA units receive training to carry out offensive operations, or will they simply defend select locales? It is no exaggeration to say that the president dumped a half-baked plan on lawmakers and then demanded that they take immediate action. This behavior hardly builds the kind of trust necessary to turn the program into a success.

The maneuver calls to mind Obama’s sudden request from Congress, in September 2013, for an authorization of force against Assad. The president knew full well that the request had no chance of approval. He was scuttling his own initiative. As it turned out, the Russian proposal to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons gave the president a pretext to call off the vote, but defeat was foretold.

A similar calculation is undoubtedly at work today. This is not to say that Obama is expecting Congress to reject his West Point initiative in its entirety, but it will not give him the blank check that he has demanded. And the inevitable wrangling between the executive and legislative branches will provide the White House with opportunities for further delay.

Third, and most significant, the call for getting tough with Assad is entirely inconsistent with the general thinking of the president and his team. An enlightening report by Josh Rogin of The Daily Beast confirms my claim that significant actors in the administration indeed believe that Assad and his Iranian patrons can be helpful in arresting the growth of the jihadi statelet that has now sprung up in Iraq. Rogin quotes one senior Obama administration official as saying, “Anyone calling for regime change in Syria is frankly blind to the past decade, and [to] the collapse of eastern Syria, and [the] growth of Jihadistan, leading to 30 to 50 suicide attacks a month in Iraq.”

If officials are willing to speak openly in this manner, what explains the policy of misdirection? The president is balancing competing demands. He needs a policy, however disingenuous, that allows him to refute the accusation that he is indifferent to some of the worst human rights abuses that we have seen in the last half-century. His Potemkin initiative allows him to claim, as he said in his West Point speech, that he is standing up to “a dictator who bombs and starves his own people.” What is more, the policy covers the president’s tracks before Congress and the American people, who are skeptical about any kind of partnership with Iran and Assad.

Authors

An article that I published last week argued that President Obama is supporting Iran in Syria and Iraq, and that he is leaving America’s traditional allies and the Syrian opposition in the lurch. The article claimed that the president was being disingenuous when, in his commencement speech at West Point on May 28, he announced his intention “to ramp up support” for the Free Syria Army (FSA). That accusation deserves a more detailed explanation than I was able to provide in the body of the article itself.

On the surface the president’s new initiative looks impressive. After making his grand announcement in a major foreign policy speech, Obama turned to Congress with a request for $500 million to fund a new program to train and equip the FSA. For the first time the military, rather than the CIA, is to play a role in assisting Assad’s enemies. But a close look at the details of the request reveals a Potemkin structure.

The West Point initiative fits perfectly with what a well-established pattern of misdirection by the White House. Call it the Syria two-step. The president or a member of his administration issues a statement of support for the FSA that is long on pious intention but short on practical details. After gaining credit from the media for taking action, the president then quietly backs away from his own initiative, taking care never to admit that he is doing so.

In addition to this track record, there are three others reasons to believe that we are, once again, at the beginning of a new round of the two-step.

First, the West Point initiative, if it ever really materializes, will have no practical impact for at least a year, probably longer. Before the military can get to work, two pieces of legislation must pass Congress: an appropriations bill, which will fund the program, and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which will provide the military with the necessary authorities to involve itself in Syria. Given Congress’s schedule, the NDAA will not come up for a vote until after the midterm elections—not until December, possibly even January 2015. Even if the military rushes to work immediately after the passage of the bill, another six months to a year will elapse before American-trained FSA units can actually arrive on the battlefield. The earliest we could hope to see any impact is June 2015, and even that late date is probably unrealistic.

Second, no prior planning went into the initiative before Obama announced it—none whatsoever. The most basic questions have yet to be answered. Who is going to be trained? Which regional allies will help in the effort? Will FSA units receive training to carry out offensive operations, or will they simply defend select locales? It is no exaggeration to say that the president dumped a half-baked plan on lawmakers and then demanded that they take immediate action. This behavior hardly builds the kind of trust necessary to turn the program into a success.

The maneuver calls to mind Obama’s sudden request from Congress, in September 2013, for an authorization of force against Assad. The president knew full well that the request had no chance of approval. He was scuttling his own initiative. As it turned out, the Russian proposal to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons gave the president a pretext to call off the vote, but defeat was foretold.

A similar calculation is undoubtedly at work today. This is not to say that Obama is expecting Congress to reject his West Point initiative in its entirety, but it will not give him the blank check that he has demanded. And the inevitable wrangling between the executive and legislative branches will provide the White House with opportunities for further delay.

Third, and most significant, the call for getting tough with Assad is entirely inconsistent with the general thinking of the president and his team. An enlightening report by Josh Rogin of The Daily Beast confirms my claim that significant actors in the administration indeed believe that Assad and his Iranian patrons can be helpful in arresting the growth of the jihadi statelet that has now sprung up in Iraq. Rogin quotes one senior Obama administration official as saying, “Anyone calling for regime change in Syria is frankly blind to the past decade, and [to] the collapse of eastern Syria, and [the] growth of Jihadistan, leading to 30 to 50 suicide attacks a month in Iraq.”

If officials are willing to speak openly in this manner, what explains the policy of misdirection? The president is balancing competing demands. He needs a policy, however disingenuous, that allows him to refute the accusation that he is indifferent to some of the worst human rights abuses that we have seen in the last half-century. His Potemkin initiative allows him to claim, as he said in his West Point speech, that he is standing up to “a dictator who bombs and starves his own people.” What is more, the policy covers the president’s tracks before Congress and the American people, who are skeptical about any kind of partnership with Iran and Assad.

Authors

]]>
http://www.brookings.edu/events/2014/05/21-islam-politics-comparative-perspective-cook?rssid=doranm{46488119-72BE-4387-800C-279B8FCE7021}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/77165974/0/brookingsrss/experts/doranm~Islam-and-Politics-in-a-Comparative-PerspectiveIslam and Politics in a Comparative Perspective

The starting-point of the book is the fact that Islam is more salient in modern politics than any other major religion. While each element within the Islamic revival of the last few decades—the rise in piety and observance, the politics of Muslim identity, the politics of Muslim values, the politics of the Muslim state, and the legitimation of violence as a religious duty—can be paralleled in some other religion, the fact is that the combination is unique to the Islamic case.

Why should Islam be so politically salient? In a world in which the West is the outlier at one end of the spectrum, why should it be the Islamic world that is the outlier at the other end?

The book is a sustained attempt to answer this question by looking successively at the capacity of Islam to shape political identity, its ability to provide its adherents with values that are attractive in modern political contexts, and the readiness with which it can be restated in a fundamentalist vein.

With regard to identity, Cook argued that Islam provides its adherents with an identity that is at least potentially political: it was closely associated with membership of a polity during the rise of Islam, and this association can readily be invoked in modern times. He contrasted this with the way Hindu identity politics are wrong-footed by the absence from the tradition of a concept of Hindu identity, and by the way the caste system renders much of the population indifferent or hostile to political appeals to such an identity.

With regard to values, he stressed the fact that some of the values associated with the early Islamic polity play very well in the modern world—the relative egalitarianism that marks early Islamic society, for example, and its rejection of despotism and patrimonialism. These are values that resonate in the modern world in a way that the hierarchic social values and exclusively monarchic political values of the Hindu tradition do not.

With regard to fundamentalism, he emphasized the way in which going back to the roots of the tradition can highlight values that are in tune with those of modern times—more so than the values of the later Islamic tradition, or those enshrined in the earliest texts of other religions.

Cook made it clear that he was not saying that Muslims are constrained by their tradition to construct their politics out of their religion; indeed much of the politics of the modern Muslim world has been conducted under the aegis of non-religious values, variously liberal, leftist, fascist, and above all nationalist. Nor was he saying that a commitment to construct one’s political values out of one’s religion commits one to any specific kind of Islamist politics: Islamism comes in very different flavors. What he was saying is that the Muslim heritage provides its adherents with options for constructing their politics that followers of other religions may not have.

The starting-point of the book is the fact that Islam is more salient in modern politics than any other major religion. While each element within the Islamic revival of the last few decades—the rise in piety and observance, the politics of Muslim identity, the politics of Muslim values, the politics of the Muslim state, and the legitimation of violence as a religious duty—can be paralleled in some other religion, the fact is that the combination is unique to the Islamic case.

Why should Islam be so politically salient? In a world in which the West is the outlier at one end of the spectrum, why should it be the Islamic world that is the outlier at the other end?

The book is a sustained attempt to answer this question by looking successively at the capacity of Islam to shape political identity, its ability to provide its adherents with values that are attractive in modern political contexts, and the readiness with which it can be restated in a fundamentalist vein.

With regard to identity, Cook argued that Islam provides its adherents with an identity that is at least potentially political: it was closely associated with membership of a polity during the rise of Islam, and this association can readily be invoked in modern times. He contrasted this with the way Hindu identity politics are wrong-footed by the absence from the tradition of a concept of Hindu identity, and by the way the caste system renders much of the population indifferent or hostile to political appeals to such an identity.

With regard to values, he stressed the fact that some of the values associated with the early Islamic polity play very well in the modern world—the relative egalitarianism that marks early Islamic society, for example, and its rejection of despotism and patrimonialism. These are values that resonate in the modern world in a way that the hierarchic social values and exclusively monarchic political values of the Hindu tradition do not.

With regard to fundamentalism, he emphasized the way in which going back to the roots of the tradition can highlight values that are in tune with those of modern times—more so than the values of the later Islamic tradition, or those enshrined in the earliest texts of other religions.

Cook made it clear that he was not saying that Muslims are constrained by their tradition to construct their politics out of their religion; indeed much of the politics of the modern Muslim world has been conducted under the aegis of non-religious values, variously liberal, leftist, fascist, and above all nationalist. Nor was he saying that a commitment to construct one’s political values out of one’s religion commits one to any specific kind of Islamist politics: Islamism comes in very different flavors. What he was saying is that the Muslim heritage provides its adherents with options for constructing their politics that followers of other religions may not have.

Event Materials

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http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2014/04/04-vladimir-putin-ukraine-reveals-his-view-of-middle-east-iran?rssid=doranm{6898499A-DF41-4A32-9354-96805BDA9827}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/80154754/0/brookingsrss/experts/doranm~Ukraine-Reveals-to-Us-How-Vladimir-Putin-Sees-the-Middle-EastUkraine Reveals to Us How Vladimir Putin Sees the Middle East

Does the Ukraine crisis mark the beginning of a new cold war? The answer from President Obama is a firm no. “The United States does not view Europe as a battleground between East and West, nor do we see the situation in Ukraine as a zero-sum game. That’s the kind of thinking that should have ended with the cold war,” he told a Dutch newspaper.

The president is partially correct. Unlike the Soviet Union, Russia has neither the intention nor the capability to challenge the entire European order, and it is certainly not mounting a global revolutionary movement. Nevertheless, it is a revanchist power, and its appetites are much larger than the president cares to admit.

That Russian President Vladimir Putin sees Ukraine as a zero-sum game seems obvious. Somewhat less apparent is the fact that his revisionist aspirations also extend elsewhere, and most saliently to the Middle East.

Obama’s first-term effort to “reset” relations with Russia was rooted in the firm conviction that the main cause of Russian-American competition in the Middle East lay in the previous Bush administration’s war on terror, which was read by the Russian leader as a pretext for a global power grab. Bush’s freedom agenda, with its support for democratic reform inside Russia, only confirmed Putin’s worst suspicions.

Alienating Putin, the Obama White House believed, had been a strategic blunder, depriving the United States of a potentially valuable partner. Putin, whatever his faults, was a realist: someone who could cut a deal in situations—like those in the Middle East—where Russia and America shared many interests. Once Putin fully grasped our sincerity, demonstrated by our ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russian fears of American aggressiveness would dissipate and Russian-American cooperation would blossom.

Unfortunately, getting through to Putin proved harder and took longer than expected—though not for want of trying. Famously, during the 2012 American presidential campaign, an open microphone caught Obama making his pitch. “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility,” he told then-Russian President Dimitry Medvedev. “I understand,” Medvedev answered. “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

Eventually, Putin did seem to grasp the concept. When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stepped forward last September with an offer to strip Syria’s Bashar al-Assad of his chemical weapons, Obama saw the move as a breakthrough, precisely the kind of mutually beneficial arrangement that the Russian reset was designed to generate. Soon, working together on the chemical-weapons problem, Secretary of State John Kerry and Lavrov also conspired to launch Geneva II, a peace conference designed to find a diplomatic solution to the Syrian civil war.

In the dawning new era, Syria was seen by the White House as a prototype: a model for stabilizing the Middle East and containing its worst pathologies. If successful, it could be applied to other problems in the region—including the Iranian nuclear program, the greatest challenge of all. In his speech at the General Assembly last September, the president was eager to defend his friendship with Putin in just these terms. “[L]et’s remember this is not a zero-sum endeavor,” Obama reminded his critics. “We’re no longer in a cold war.”

Today, just six months later, the new model is collapsing before our eyes. The proximate cause is the spillover from the Ukraine crisis. On March 19, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned that if the West imposed sanctions over the annexation of Crimea, Russia would retaliate by exacting a much greater price: it would throw its support to Iran in the nuclear talks. “The historic importance of what happened . . . regarding the restoration of historical justice and reunification of Crimea with Russia,” Ryabkov explained, “is incomparable to what we are dealing with in the Iranian issue.”

Even before Ryabkov issued this extortionate threat, there were clear signs that the Kremlin never truly supported the new model of Middle East cooperation. Kerry and Lavrov did convene Geneva II in January, but the conference ended in abject failure thanks to the intransigence of the Assad regime—which after all is Russia’s client. Shortly thereafter, Kerry openly blamed Russia for the Syrian disaster. “Russia needs to be a part of the solution,” he complained, “not contributing so many more weapons and so much more aid that they are really enabling Assad to double down.”

In the Middle East as in Eastern Europe, then, the reset looks increasingly bankrupt. In fact, being based on two major errors, it never had a chance.

The administration’s first error was the failure to appreciate Putin’s either-or perspective on politics, a viewpoint succinctly expressed in Lenin’s famous formula: “who-whom?” Who will dominate whom? In Putin’s view, all accommodations with the United States are tactical maneuvers in a struggle—sometimes overt, sometimes covert—for the upper hand.

In the bad old days of the cold war, the overtly malevolent intentions of the Kremlin were hard to misread (although, even then, some American leaders did try to misread them). Today, Russia’s motivations are more complex: a unique mix of Great Russian nationalism, crony capitalism, and autocratic whimsy. This makes it difficult to predict the Kremlin’s behavior. For 364 days of the year, a deal between a Western client and Gazprom, the largest Russian natural-gas supplier, will function like a normal business transaction. On the 365th day, to teach the recipient a lesson about who’s really in charge, Putin will cut the gas flow.

Adding to the unpredictability is Putin’s mercurial-seeming personality. Perhaps the single most revealing fact about him is his interest in Sambo, a Russian form of judo whose techniques have been deliberately tailored to the requirements of each state security service. “Judo teaches self-control, the ability to feel the moment, to see the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses,” Putin writes in his official biography on the Kremlin website. “I am sure you will agree that these are essential abilities and skills for any politician.” As a former KGB agent and judo black belt, Putin is undoubtedly adept at the deceptive move that turns an ordinary handshake into a crippling wristlock, instantly driving the adversary’s head to the ground.

Turning a blind eye to such niceties, Western politicians assumed that by enmeshing Putin in a web of diplomatic and economic deals, they would foster in Moscow a sense of shared destiny that would ultimately work to moderate Russian behavior. As the Ukraine crisis demonstrates, the web has indeed created mutual dependencies. But the crisis also reveals that the two sides do not approach dependency in a spirit of reciprocity. When shaking hands on a deal, Putin never fails to assess whether he has positioned himself for a speedy takedown of his partner.

The Sambo approach to diplomacy is particularly suited to the Middle East, where international relations, more often than not, is a zero-sum game dominated by brutal men with guns. This is Putin’s natural habitat; as prime minister in 1999, he supported the Russian military’s use of ballistic missiles against civilians in Grozny. It is a simple truism that a leader habitually photographed shirtless while performing feats of derring-do will understand the politics of the Middle East better than sophisticated Westerners who believe that the world has evolved beyond crude displays of machismo.

Lack of attention to the perfect fit between Putin’s mentality and Middle East reality constitutes the second error of the administration’s Russian reset.

With respect to political alignments, the most influential event in today’s Middle East is the Syrian civil war. That the conflict is barbarous is easily gleaned from a slogan of the pro-Assad forces, scrawled on buildings in all major cities: “Assad, or we will burn the country.” This demand has divided the entire region into two groups. On one side stand the allies of America: the Saudis, Turks, and other Sunni Muslim states, all of whom agree that, come what may, Assad must go. On the other side, the Iranians, together with Hizballah, have lined up squarely behind Assad, their partner in the so-called Resistance Alliance.

For Putin, Syria has raised two key questions, each a variant of who-whom: (1) who will dominate inside Syria; (2) who will dominate in the region more broadly. It was Foreign Minister Lavrov who two years ago, in a rare slip of the tongue, best explained how Putin saw these questions: “if the current Syrian regime collapses, some countries in the region will want to establish Sunni rule in Syria.” More bluntly, the Kremlin sees itself as the great-power patron not just of the Assad regime but also of Iran and Hizballah—the entire Resistance Alliance. At the time, Moscow’s unvarnished preference for Shiites won little attention in the United States, but it sparked a storm of outrage in the Sunni Arab world, leading one prominent Saudi commentator to dub the foreign minister “Mullah Lavrov.”

Not surprisingly, Putin’s position was in perfect keeping with one of the most fundamental rules of strategy, perhaps best expressed by Machiavelli: “A prince is . . . esteemed when he is a true friend and a true enemy, that is, when without any hesitation he discloses himself in support of someone against another.” In the Middle East, Machiavelli’s logic is inescapable, and Putin grasps it intuitively. Not so Obama, who has convinced himself that he can hover above the gritty game on the ground yet somehow still remain an influential player.

In Syria, the United States criticizes Assad harshly and says it sympathizes with the opposition. But it releases only dribs and drabs of military aid to opposition forces while simultaneously qualifying and hedging its diplomatic support. Fretting incessantly about the Sunni jihadist elements fighting the Assad regime, it develops no strategy to combat them; instead, it cozies up to Assad’s Russian and Iranian patrons. When the Sunni allies of the United States compare the confusion of American policy with the clarity of Russian strategy, it’s no wonder they despair.

Obama is not entirely oblivious of the problem. In a recent interview, the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg asked him bluntly, “So why are the Sunnis so nervous about you?” His answer: “[T]here are shifts that are taking place in the region that have caught a lot of them off-guard. I think change is always scary. I think there was a comfort with a United States that was comfortable with an existing order and the existing alignments, and was an implacable foe of Iran.” This exercise in condescension, while doing nothing to allay and everything to aggravate the fears of America’s allies, offers a glimpse into the mindset that generated the reset, a mindset that dreamed of a concert arrangement whereby both Russia and America would place a greater value on comity with each other than either would put on its relations with allies.

To be sure, Putin will gladly sign on to American-sponsored initiatives like Geneva II. But he will insist on guiding them in directions that, regardless of their stated intentions, serve the interests of his clients. If the Obama administration has yet to admit or adjust to this reality, that is partly because the Russians do not wave a flag identifying themselves as the great-power patrons of Iran, Syria, and Hizballah. Nor does Putin back Tehran and Damascus to the hilt as the Soviet Union backed its clients in the cold war.

It is thus more accurate to say that Russia is in an alignment, not an alliance, with Iran and Syria. Depending upon competing priorities and the vicissitudes of world politics, Putin will tack this way today, that way tomorrow. In the end, however, he will never sell out Tehran and Damascus in order to win compliments in Washington; if forced to choose, he will always side with the former against the latter, and will certainly leave them in no doubt that Russia is their most dependable friend in the United Nations Security Council.

It is this fact that makes Russia a revisionist power in the Middle East and the permanent adversary of the United States.

What, then, about the Iranian nuclear question? Hasn’t Russia consistently called for preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon? Didn’t it vote in favor of six Security Council resolutions against Tehran? Hasn’t it signed on to the economic sanctions? Surely all of these actions support the Obama administration’s contention that Russia, in certain contexts, is a valuable partner.

Indeed, Putin has a strong track record of supporting some actions designed to prevent an Iranian bomb; in an ideal world, he would probably prefer an Iran devoid of such weapons. But he also has a strong track record of building the Iranian nuclear program and of providing security assistance to the Iranian military. Whatever his preferences in an ideal world, in the here and now his goal is less to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon than to garner as much power and influence for Russia as he can. He is supportive enough of the United States and its key European partners to maintain credibility with them. On the key issue of stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, he is never so supportive as to be taken for granted.

How this cynical game works was revealed in Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov’s extortionate threat mentioned earlier. It has placed Obama on the horns of a severe dilemma. If, on the one hand, the president simply acquiesces in Putin’s power play in Ukraine, he will embolden not just Russia but also Iran, Syria, and Hizballah by demonstrating that, just as in Syria, he retreats when challenged. If, on the other hand, he marshals a robust Western response, he could well provoke the threatened Russian countermeasures of increased support for Iran.

No matter which course the president follows, the Ukraine crisis has damaged the prestige of the United States in the Middle East. America’s Arab friends in the region, who are on the front line against Iran, Syria, and Hizballah, already feel the pinch, and are deeply uncertain about how to respond. Unlike the Resistance Alliance, they are not accustomed to cooperating on their own. As Karl Marx notoriously said of peasants, America’s Arab allies are like potatoes. When U.S. leadership provides a sack, they take on a single form and become hefty in weight. In its absence, they are a loose assortment of small, isolated units.

The ally who most immediately feels the fallout is Israel. On March 17, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon described, with unusual bluntness, the consequences of what he called the “feebleness” of American foreign policy. The Obama administration’s weakness, he argued, was undermining the position not just of Israel but also of America’s Sunni allies. “The moderate Sunni camp in the area expected the United States to support it, and to be firm, like Russia’s support for the Shiite axis,” Yaalon lamented.

Yaalon spoke no less despairingly of Obama’s ability to make good on his pledge to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. “[A]t some stage,” he observed, “the United States entered into negotiations with them, and unhappily, when it comes to negotiating at a Persian bazaar, the Iranians were better.” On the matter of Iran, Yaalon concluded, inevitably, “we have to behave as though we have nobody to look out for us but ourselves.”

Whether Israel actually has the political will and military capability to launch an independent strike against Iran is anybody’s guess. But two facts are undeniable. First, Putin’s muscular foreign policy and Washington’s timorous response have increased the pressure on Israel to strike independently. Second, Obama has lost influence over the Israelis—just as he lost influence over his Arab allies when he refused to back them on Syria.

Adrift in Machiavelli’s no man’s land, neither a true friend nor a true enemy, Washington is left with the worst of both worlds, treated by its adversaries with contempt, charged by its friends with abandonment and betrayal. President Obama was correct to say at the UN that the U.S. and Russia are no longer locked in a cold war. But it was a strategic delusion to assume that Putin’s handshake was an offer of partnership. It was instead the opening gambit in a new style of global competition—one that, in the Middle East, Russia and its clients are winning and the United States, despite huge natural advantages, is losing.

Does the Ukraine crisis mark the beginning of a new cold war? The answer from President Obama is a firm no. “The United States does not view Europe as a battleground between East and West, nor do we see the situation in Ukraine as a zero-sum game. That’s the kind of thinking that should have ended with the cold war,” he told a Dutch newspaper.

The president is partially correct. Unlike the Soviet Union, Russia has neither the intention nor the capability to challenge the entire European order, and it is certainly not mounting a global revolutionary movement. Nevertheless, it is a revanchist power, and its appetites are much larger than the president cares to admit.

That Russian President Vladimir Putin sees Ukraine as a zero-sum game seems obvious. Somewhat less apparent is the fact that his revisionist aspirations also extend elsewhere, and most saliently to the Middle East.

Obama’s first-term effort to “reset” relations with Russia was rooted in the firm conviction that the main cause of Russian-American competition in the Middle East lay in the previous Bush administration’s war on terror, which was read by the Russian leader as a pretext for a global power grab. Bush’s freedom agenda, with its support for democratic reform inside Russia, only confirmed Putin’s worst suspicions.

Alienating Putin, the Obama White House believed, had been a strategic blunder, depriving the United States of a potentially valuable partner. Putin, whatever his faults, was a realist: someone who could cut a deal in situations—like those in the Middle East—where Russia and America shared many interests. Once Putin fully grasped our sincerity, demonstrated by our ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russian fears of American aggressiveness would dissipate and Russian-American cooperation would blossom.

Unfortunately, getting through to Putin proved harder and took longer than expected—though not for want of trying. Famously, during the 2012 American presidential campaign, an open microphone caught Obama making his pitch. “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility,” he told then-Russian President Dimitry Medvedev. “I understand,” Medvedev answered. “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

Eventually, Putin did seem to grasp the concept. When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stepped forward last September with an offer to strip Syria’s Bashar al-Assad of his chemical weapons, Obama saw the move as a breakthrough, precisely the kind of mutually beneficial arrangement that the Russian reset was designed to generate. Soon, working together on the chemical-weapons problem, Secretary of State John Kerry and Lavrov also conspired to launch Geneva II, a peace conference designed to find a diplomatic solution to the Syrian civil war.

In the dawning new era, Syria was seen by the White House as a prototype: a model for stabilizing the Middle East and containing its worst pathologies. If successful, it could be applied to other problems in the region—including the Iranian nuclear program, the greatest challenge of all. In his speech at the General Assembly last September, the president was eager to defend his friendship with Putin in just these terms. “[L]et’s remember this is not a zero-sum endeavor,” Obama reminded his critics. “We’re no longer in a cold war.”

Today, just six months later, the new model is collapsing before our eyes. The proximate cause is the spillover from the Ukraine crisis. On March 19, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned that if the West imposed sanctions over the annexation of Crimea, Russia would retaliate by exacting a much greater price: it would throw its support to Iran in the nuclear talks. “The historic importance of what happened . . . regarding the restoration of historical justice and reunification of Crimea with Russia,” Ryabkov explained, “is incomparable to what we are dealing with in the Iranian issue.”

Even before Ryabkov issued this extortionate threat, there were clear signs that the Kremlin never truly supported the new model of Middle East cooperation. Kerry and Lavrov did convene Geneva II in January, but the conference ended in abject failure thanks to the intransigence of the Assad regime—which after all is Russia’s client. Shortly thereafter, Kerry openly blamed Russia for the Syrian disaster. “Russia needs to be a part of the solution,” he complained, “not contributing so many more weapons and so much more aid that they are really enabling Assad to double down.”

In the Middle East as in Eastern Europe, then, the reset looks increasingly bankrupt. In fact, being based on two major errors, it never had a chance.

The administration’s first error was the failure to appreciate Putin’s either-or perspective on politics, a viewpoint succinctly expressed in Lenin’s famous formula: “who-whom?” Who will dominate whom? In Putin’s view, all accommodations with the United States are tactical maneuvers in a struggle—sometimes overt, sometimes covert—for the upper hand.

In the bad old days of the cold war, the overtly malevolent intentions of the Kremlin were hard to misread (although, even then, some American leaders did try to misread them). Today, Russia’s motivations are more complex: a unique mix of Great Russian nationalism, crony capitalism, and autocratic whimsy. This makes it difficult to predict the Kremlin’s behavior. For 364 days of the year, a deal between a Western client and Gazprom, the largest Russian natural-gas supplier, will function like a normal business transaction. On the 365th day, to teach the recipient a lesson about who’s really in charge, Putin will cut the gas flow.

Adding to the unpredictability is Putin’s mercurial-seeming personality. Perhaps the single most revealing fact about him is his interest in Sambo, a Russian form of judo whose techniques have been deliberately tailored to the requirements of each state security service. “Judo teaches self-control, the ability to feel the moment, to see the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses,” Putin writes in his official biography on the Kremlin website. “I am sure you will agree that these are essential abilities and skills for any politician.” As a former KGB agent and judo black belt, Putin is undoubtedly adept at the deceptive move that turns an ordinary handshake into a crippling wristlock, instantly driving the adversary’s head to the ground.

Turning a blind eye to such niceties, Western politicians assumed that by enmeshing Putin in a web of diplomatic and economic deals, they would foster in Moscow a sense of shared destiny that would ultimately work to moderate Russian behavior. As the Ukraine crisis demonstrates, the web has indeed created mutual dependencies. But the crisis also reveals that the two sides do not approach dependency in a spirit of reciprocity. When shaking hands on a deal, Putin never fails to assess whether he has positioned himself for a speedy takedown of his partner.

The Sambo approach to diplomacy is particularly suited to the Middle East, where international relations, more often than not, is a zero-sum game dominated by brutal men with guns. This is Putin’s natural habitat; as prime minister in 1999, he supported the Russian military’s use of ballistic missiles against civilians in Grozny. It is a simple truism that a leader habitually photographed shirtless while performing feats of derring-do will understand the politics of the Middle East better than sophisticated Westerners who believe that the world has evolved beyond crude displays of machismo.

Lack of attention to the perfect fit between Putin’s mentality and Middle East reality constitutes the second error of the administration’s Russian reset.

With respect to political alignments, the most influential event in today’s Middle East is the Syrian civil war. That the conflict is barbarous is easily gleaned from a slogan of the pro-Assad forces, scrawled on buildings in all major cities: “Assad, or we will burn the country.” This demand has divided the entire region into two groups. On one side stand the allies of America: the Saudis, Turks, and other Sunni Muslim states, all of whom agree that, come what may, Assad must go. On the other side, the Iranians, together with Hizballah, have lined up squarely behind Assad, their partner in the so-called Resistance Alliance.

For Putin, Syria has raised two key questions, each a variant of who-whom: (1) who will dominate inside Syria; (2) who will dominate in the region more broadly. It was Foreign Minister Lavrov who two years ago, in a rare slip of the tongue, best explained how Putin saw these questions: “if the current Syrian regime collapses, some countries in the region will want to establish Sunni rule in Syria.” More bluntly, the Kremlin sees itself as the great-power patron not just of the Assad regime but also of Iran and Hizballah—the entire Resistance Alliance. At the time, Moscow’s unvarnished preference for Shiites won little attention in the United States, but it sparked a storm of outrage in the Sunni Arab world, leading one prominent Saudi commentator to dub the foreign minister “Mullah Lavrov.”

Not surprisingly, Putin’s position was in perfect keeping with one of the most fundamental rules of strategy, perhaps best expressed by Machiavelli: “A prince is . . . esteemed when he is a true friend and a true enemy, that is, when without any hesitation he discloses himself in support of someone against another.” In the Middle East, Machiavelli’s logic is inescapable, and Putin grasps it intuitively. Not so Obama, who has convinced himself that he can hover above the gritty game on the ground yet somehow still remain an influential player.

In Syria, the United States criticizes Assad harshly and says it sympathizes with the opposition. But it releases only dribs and drabs of military aid to opposition forces while simultaneously qualifying and hedging its diplomatic support. Fretting incessantly about the Sunni jihadist elements fighting the Assad regime, it develops no strategy to combat them; instead, it cozies up to Assad’s Russian and Iranian patrons. When the Sunni allies of the United States compare the confusion of American policy with the clarity of Russian strategy, it’s no wonder they despair.

Obama is not entirely oblivious of the problem. In a recent interview, the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg asked him bluntly, “So why are the Sunnis so nervous about you?” His answer: “[T]here are shifts that are taking place in the region that have caught a lot of them off-guard. I think change is always scary. I think there was a comfort with a United States that was comfortable with an existing order and the existing alignments, and was an implacable foe of Iran.” This exercise in condescension, while doing nothing to allay and everything to aggravate the fears of America’s allies, offers a glimpse into the mindset that generated the reset, a mindset that dreamed of a concert arrangement whereby both Russia and America would place a greater value on comity with each other than either would put on its relations with allies.

To be sure, Putin will gladly sign on to American-sponsored initiatives like Geneva II. But he will insist on guiding them in directions that, regardless of their stated intentions, serve the interests of his clients. If the Obama administration has yet to admit or adjust to this reality, that is partly because the Russians do not wave a flag identifying themselves as the great-power patrons of Iran, Syria, and Hizballah. Nor does Putin back Tehran and Damascus to the hilt as the Soviet Union backed its clients in the cold war.

It is thus more accurate to say that Russia is in an alignment, not an alliance, with Iran and Syria. Depending upon competing priorities and the vicissitudes of world politics, Putin will tack this way today, that way tomorrow. In the end, however, he will never sell out Tehran and Damascus in order to win compliments in Washington; if forced to choose, he will always side with the former against the latter, and will certainly leave them in no doubt that Russia is their most dependable friend in the United Nations Security Council.

It is this fact that makes Russia a revisionist power in the Middle East and the permanent adversary of the United States.

What, then, about the Iranian nuclear question? Hasn’t Russia consistently called for preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon? Didn’t it vote in favor of six Security Council resolutions against Tehran? Hasn’t it signed on to the economic sanctions? Surely all of these actions support the Obama administration’s contention that Russia, in certain contexts, is a valuable partner.

Indeed, Putin has a strong track record of supporting some actions designed to prevent an Iranian bomb; in an ideal world, he would probably prefer an Iran devoid of such weapons. But he also has a strong track record of building the Iranian nuclear program and of providing security assistance to the Iranian military. Whatever his preferences in an ideal world, in the here and now his goal is less to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon than to garner as much power and influence for Russia as he can. He is supportive enough of the United States and its key European partners to maintain credibility with them. On the key issue of stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, he is never so supportive as to be taken for granted.

How this cynical game works was revealed in Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov’s extortionate threat mentioned earlier. It has placed Obama on the horns of a severe dilemma. If, on the one hand, the president simply acquiesces in Putin’s power play in Ukraine, he will embolden not just Russia but also Iran, Syria, and Hizballah by demonstrating that, just as in Syria, he retreats when challenged. If, on the other hand, he marshals a robust Western response, he could well provoke the threatened Russian countermeasures of increased support for Iran.

No matter which course the president follows, the Ukraine crisis has damaged the prestige of the United States in the Middle East. America’s Arab friends in the region, who are on the front line against Iran, Syria, and Hizballah, already feel the pinch, and are deeply uncertain about how to respond. Unlike the Resistance Alliance, they are not accustomed to cooperating on their own. As Karl Marx notoriously said of peasants, America’s Arab allies are like potatoes. When U.S. leadership provides a sack, they take on a single form and become hefty in weight. In its absence, they are a loose assortment of small, isolated units.

The ally who most immediately feels the fallout is Israel. On March 17, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon described, with unusual bluntness, the consequences of what he called the “feebleness” of American foreign policy. The Obama administration’s weakness, he argued, was undermining the position not just of Israel but also of America’s Sunni allies. “The moderate Sunni camp in the area expected the United States to support it, and to be firm, like Russia’s support for the Shiite axis,” Yaalon lamented.

Yaalon spoke no less despairingly of Obama’s ability to make good on his pledge to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. “[A]t some stage,” he observed, “the United States entered into negotiations with them, and unhappily, when it comes to negotiating at a Persian bazaar, the Iranians were better.” On the matter of Iran, Yaalon concluded, inevitably, “we have to behave as though we have nobody to look out for us but ourselves.”

Whether Israel actually has the political will and military capability to launch an independent strike against Iran is anybody’s guess. But two facts are undeniable. First, Putin’s muscular foreign policy and Washington’s timorous response have increased the pressure on Israel to strike independently. Second, Obama has lost influence over the Israelis—just as he lost influence over his Arab allies when he refused to back them on Syria.

Adrift in Machiavelli’s no man’s land, neither a true friend nor a true enemy, Washington is left with the worst of both worlds, treated by its adversaries with contempt, charged by its friends with abandonment and betrayal. President Obama was correct to say at the UN that the U.S. and Russia are no longer locked in a cold war. But it was a strategic delusion to assume that Putin’s handshake was an offer of partnership. It was instead the opening gambit in a new style of global competition—one that, in the Middle East, Russia and its clients are winning and the United States, despite huge natural advantages, is losing.

The day before Russian President Vladimir Putin flexed his muscles in Ukraine, the columnist Jeffrey Goldberg asked President Obama whether, given his failure to police his own “red line” in Syria, countries like Russia and Iran still believed he was capable of using force to advance American interests. Repudiating the inference, the president pointed to his threat last fall to intervene militarily with targeted strikes in Syria. That threat, he averred, was directly linked with the support subsequently given by both Russia and Iran to the agreement stripping the Assad regime of its chemical weapons:

We’ve now seen 15 to 20 percent of those chemical weapons on their way out of Syria with a very concrete schedule to get rid of the rest. That would not have happened had the Iranians said, “Obama’s bluffing, he’s not actually really willing to take a strike. . . .” Of course they took it seriously!

In three ways, this rendition of events is illusory. First, the Syrians are not, in fact, sticking to the chemical-weapons agreement. Assad has repeatedly dragged his feet, delaying the process of removing the weapons in order to keep Washington and the Europeans dickering with him; in the meantime, Syrian security forces continue to enjoy a free hand slaughtering people by means of conventional arms. Second, and more important, Obama’s stated goal in Syria was to establish a process that would force Assad to step aside and make way for a transitional government capable of ending the civil war. Touting his “success” with Assad’s chemical weapons is a sleight of hand, deflecting attention from the abject failure of that larger aim.

Which brings us, third, to that larger aim, an aim vehemently opposed by both the Russians and the Iranians and whose relinquishment was decisively—and handily—abetted by them. In fact, both Putin and Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, understood something very well back in the fall: Obama’s threat of force was half-hearted at best, and he was looking for a path of retreat. In coming to his rescue, Putin in particular expected a quid pro quo. In return for Russia’s agreeing to help with the chemical-weapons deal, the U.S. would back off from any pursuit of regime change.

Putin was not disappointed, and neither were the Iranians. Time and again, Obama has since made it clear that he does not intend to help the Syrian opposition topple Assad. Meanwhile, the Russians and the Iranians have redoubled their efforts in the opposite direction: training and equipping Syrian government forces and, on Iran’s part, sending detachments of the Qods Force and Iranian-trained foreign militias like Hizballah.

Contrary to what he boasted to Jeffrey Goldberg, then, Obama’s true message to Assad, Putin, and Khamenei was not, “Negotiate with me or face military action” but “Hand me a fig leaf and I will retreat.”

To judge by events now unfolding on both the Russian and the Iranian fronts, that message has been heard loud and clear. In the former case, it is undoubtedly true that many factors of a purely domestic nature have gone into determining Putin’s well-documented belligerence toward Ukraine and other countries bordering Russia. Still, the Russian leader’s decision to act forcibly must have been eased by Obama’s flaccid performance in the Middle East. As Scott Wilson of the Washington Post noted about the president’s warning to Putin to keep his hands off Crimea, “[r]arely has a threat from a U.S. president been dismissed as quickly — and comprehensively.”

But the real consequences of the Syria debacle can be seen with respect to Iran.

If the Iranians understand one thing, the president assured Jeffrey Goldberg, it’s that, if cornered, he will resort to military force to stop them from acquiring a nuclear weapon. But, just as in Syria, Obama’s primary goal in Iran is to avoid ever being cornered. Gary Samore, a former Obama White House official, has expressed it with admirable clarity: “Our strategy is to buy time.”

Unfortunately, time does not come cheap. Although the president insists that a policy of delaying the arrival of an Iranian nuclear bomb is perfectly consistent with a policy of preventing its arrival altogether, in fact the two aims are largely incompatible. Delay comes at the cost of prevention.

Stopping Iran’s march toward nuclear capability would require instilling in Ali Khamenei the certain knowledge that if he fails to drop his program, he will suffer economic ruin, or a devastating military attack, or both. To be successful, therefore, the interim diplomacy must be carried out under a hard deadline. The Iranians must be left in no doubt whatsoever that failure to reach a deal by a date certain will leave them in a much worse position than before the negotiations ever started.

Obama’s diplomacy fails this elementary test. Rather than forcing Khamenei to make a hard choice, the “interim deal” struck in Geneva last November explicitly offers him an escape route: endless negotiations. According to the terms of that deal, diplomacy can be extended indefinitely. Although defenders of the administration downplay the significance of this fact, claiming that the Iranian program is “frozen” during the period of negotiations, that claim is false. The program advances even as the diplomats haggle.

For one thing, the interim deal is silent on ballistic missiles and warheads, two key components of any nuclear program. For another thing, although the deal does extract concessions on centrifuges and enrichment, even in these areas the Iranians are still moving forward. In recent congressional testimony, David Albright, a leading expert on counter-proliferation, pointed to a major loophole in the agreement that allows continued “research and development” on second-generation centrifuges. Since, he explains, these so-called IR-2Ms are more efficient than the first-generation machines currently in operation, “At the end of the interim period Iran is likely to be far better positioned to deploy reliable IR-2m centrifuges on a mass scale at its enrichment plants. This gain would allow Iran to make up for time lost more quickly.”

Over the next months, we can expect Khamenei’s negotiators to test Obama’s red lines. What then? If the president finds himself compelled to assume a firm posture, as he did with Syria last fall, the Iranians might present him with a fig leaf in the form of a revamped interim deal. For example, they might agree to dismantle first-generation centrifuges in return for the right to replace them with IR-2Ms, thereby increasing the program’s overall capacity to enrich uranium with a decreased number of centrifuges.

Would Obama reject such a deal and launch a military strike, or would he embrace it in order to buy more time? Odds are, he’d embrace it. Congress would certainly balk, but the big showdown between Capitol Hill and the White House would not come, if ever, until after this year’s mid-term elections, by which time the president will be less constrained by domestic critics. In addition, he could deal with those critics as his staffers did when November’s interim deal was first announced, painting dissenters in Congress as warmongers and subtly suggesting that they are dancing to the tune of a foreign power (i.e., Israel). At the same time, the president could turn to the American people and proclaim, “Just as I forced Assad to give up chemical weapons, I have now compelled Iran to destroy nuclear infrastructure.”

In brief, it is undoubtedly the case that Obama’s policies have weakened the deterrent credibility of the United States everywhere. While many are now decrying the results of that weakness in the case of Ukraine, its effects are even more directly visible, and more alarming, in the case of Iran. Maybe, just maybe, the president will keep his promise to prevent Iran from going nuclear on his watch. But the emphasis is entirely on the last phrase—on his watch. That’s very different from a policy aimed at preventing Iran from going nuclear, period. Meanwhile, interim deal or no interim deal, Tehran, as aware of American election cycles as is Barack Obama himself, steadily moves toward a point within a hair’s breadth of an undetectable breakout capability.

The day before Russian President Vladimir Putin flexed his muscles in Ukraine, the columnist Jeffrey Goldberg asked President Obama whether, given his failure to police his own “red line” in Syria, countries like Russia and Iran still believed he was capable of using force to advance American interests. Repudiating the inference, the president pointed to his threat last fall to intervene militarily with targeted strikes in Syria. That threat, he averred, was directly linked with the support subsequently given by both Russia and Iran to the agreement stripping the Assad regime of its chemical weapons:

We’ve now seen 15 to 20 percent of those chemical weapons on their way out of Syria with a very concrete schedule to get rid of the rest. That would not have happened had the Iranians said, “Obama’s bluffing, he’s not actually really willing to take a strike. . . .” Of course they took it seriously!

In three ways, this rendition of events is illusory. First, the Syrians are not, in fact, sticking to the chemical-weapons agreement. Assad has repeatedly dragged his feet, delaying the process of removing the weapons in order to keep Washington and the Europeans dickering with him; in the meantime, Syrian security forces continue to enjoy a free hand slaughtering people by means of conventional arms. Second, and more important, Obama’s stated goal in Syria was to establish a process that would force Assad to step aside and make way for a transitional government capable of ending the civil war. Touting his “success” with Assad’s chemical weapons is a sleight of hand, deflecting attention from the abject failure of that larger aim.

Which brings us, third, to that larger aim, an aim vehemently opposed by both the Russians and the Iranians and whose relinquishment was decisively—and handily—abetted by them. In fact, both Putin and Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, understood something very well back in the fall: Obama’s threat of force was half-hearted at best, and he was looking for a path of retreat. In coming to his rescue, Putin in particular expected a quid pro quo. In return for Russia’s agreeing to help with the chemical-weapons deal, the U.S. would back off from any pursuit of regime change.

Putin was not disappointed, and neither were the Iranians. Time and again, Obama has since made it clear that he does not intend to help the Syrian opposition topple Assad. Meanwhile, the Russians and the Iranians have redoubled their efforts in the opposite direction: training and equipping Syrian government forces and, on Iran’s part, sending detachments of the Qods Force and Iranian-trained foreign militias like Hizballah.

Contrary to what he boasted to Jeffrey Goldberg, then, Obama’s true message to Assad, Putin, and Khamenei was not, “Negotiate with me or face military action” but “Hand me a fig leaf and I will retreat.”

To judge by events now unfolding on both the Russian and the Iranian fronts, that message has been heard loud and clear. In the former case, it is undoubtedly true that many factors of a purely domestic nature have gone into determining Putin’s well-documented belligerence toward Ukraine and other countries bordering Russia. Still, the Russian leader’s decision to act forcibly must have been eased by Obama’s flaccid performance in the Middle East. As Scott Wilson of the Washington Post noted about the president’s warning to Putin to keep his hands off Crimea, “[r]arely has a threat from a U.S. president been dismissed as quickly — and comprehensively.”

But the real consequences of the Syria debacle can be seen with respect to Iran.

If the Iranians understand one thing, the president assured Jeffrey Goldberg, it’s that, if cornered, he will resort to military force to stop them from acquiring a nuclear weapon. But, just as in Syria, Obama’s primary goal in Iran is to avoid ever being cornered. Gary Samore, a former Obama White House official, has expressed it with admirable clarity: “Our strategy is to buy time.”

Unfortunately, time does not come cheap. Although the president insists that a policy of delaying the arrival of an Iranian nuclear bomb is perfectly consistent with a policy of preventing its arrival altogether, in fact the two aims are largely incompatible. Delay comes at the cost of prevention.

Stopping Iran’s march toward nuclear capability would require instilling in Ali Khamenei the certain knowledge that if he fails to drop his program, he will suffer economic ruin, or a devastating military attack, or both. To be successful, therefore, the interim diplomacy must be carried out under a hard deadline. The Iranians must be left in no doubt whatsoever that failure to reach a deal by a date certain will leave them in a much worse position than before the negotiations ever started.

Obama’s diplomacy fails this elementary test. Rather than forcing Khamenei to make a hard choice, the “interim deal” struck in Geneva last November explicitly offers him an escape route: endless negotiations. According to the terms of that deal, diplomacy can be extended indefinitely. Although defenders of the administration downplay the significance of this fact, claiming that the Iranian program is “frozen” during the period of negotiations, that claim is false. The program advances even as the diplomats haggle.

For one thing, the interim deal is silent on ballistic missiles and warheads, two key components of any nuclear program. For another thing, although the deal does extract concessions on centrifuges and enrichment, even in these areas the Iranians are still moving forward. In recent congressional testimony, David Albright, a leading expert on counter-proliferation, pointed to a major loophole in the agreement that allows continued “research and development” on second-generation centrifuges. Since, he explains, these so-called IR-2Ms are more efficient than the first-generation machines currently in operation, “At the end of the interim period Iran is likely to be far better positioned to deploy reliable IR-2m centrifuges on a mass scale at its enrichment plants. This gain would allow Iran to make up for time lost more quickly.”

Over the next months, we can expect Khamenei’s negotiators to test Obama’s red lines. What then? If the president finds himself compelled to assume a firm posture, as he did with Syria last fall, the Iranians might present him with a fig leaf in the form of a revamped interim deal. For example, they might agree to dismantle first-generation centrifuges in return for the right to replace them with IR-2Ms, thereby increasing the program’s overall capacity to enrich uranium with a decreased number of centrifuges.

Would Obama reject such a deal and launch a military strike, or would he embrace it in order to buy more time? Odds are, he’d embrace it. Congress would certainly balk, but the big showdown between Capitol Hill and the White House would not come, if ever, until after this year’s mid-term elections, by which time the president will be less constrained by domestic critics. In addition, he could deal with those critics as his staffers did when November’s interim deal was first announced, painting dissenters in Congress as warmongers and subtly suggesting that they are dancing to the tune of a foreign power (i.e., Israel). At the same time, the president could turn to the American people and proclaim, “Just as I forced Assad to give up chemical weapons, I have now compelled Iran to destroy nuclear infrastructure.”

In brief, it is undoubtedly the case that Obama’s policies have weakened the deterrent credibility of the United States everywhere. While many are now decrying the results of that weakness in the case of Ukraine, its effects are even more directly visible, and more alarming, in the case of Iran. Maybe, just maybe, the president will keep his promise to prevent Iran from going nuclear on his watch. But the emphasis is entirely on the last phrase—on his watch. That’s very different from a policy aimed at preventing Iran from going nuclear, period. Meanwhile, interim deal or no interim deal, Tehran, as aware of American election cycles as is Barack Obama himself, steadily moves toward a point within a hair’s breadth of an undetectable breakout capability.

Authors

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http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2014/03/14-doran-obama-iran-syria-bluffing-assad-nukes-jpoa?rssid=doranm{797E1BD1-ADD7-432C-9BB1-C03026D58927}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/80154756/0/brookingsrss/experts/doranm~Obama-Is-Bluffing-On-IranObama Is Bluffing On Iran

Editor's Note: This article by Michael Doran was originally published on Mosaic Magazine under the headline "I Don’t Bluff” on Monday, February 6, 2014.

President Obama has repeatedly promised to do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb. If there is no other choice, he says, he will resort to force. In a March 2012 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, the president famously rejected the alternative policy, namely, allowing Iran to go nuclear and then trying to contain it. He emphasized the point dramatically: “[A]s president of the United States,” he said, “I don’t bluff.”

Really? Suppose this statement was just a show of toughness, timed to keep supporters of Israel on his side during the 2012 campaign season. Suppose that, when it came to Iran, in his heart of hearts, the president actually preferred a strategy of containment to a strategy of prevention. Suppose that was actually his policy aim from the outset—but, for obvious reasons, he couldn’t say so. How would he proceed?

He would proceed exactly as he has been proceeding—trumpeting his intention to roll back the Iranian nuclear program while actually avoiding confrontation at all costs.

To gain a sense of the president’s methods, consider first the saga of Syria’s use of chemical weapons that developed in 2013. Each time the situation called for a tough response, Obama telegraphed a punch—his famous “red line”—but then never actually delivered the blow.

The White House first realized that Bashar al-Assad had employed chemical weapons in the spring of last year. Its immediate reaction, however, was anything but a rush to enforce the president’s announced red line. On the contrary, it stalled for time. When the political pressure to respond became unbearable, the White House announced, in June, an intention to increase aid to the Syrian opposition. The president, it now seemed clear, was going to force Assad to pay a price for his barbarity. But the announcement soon revealed itself as a ploy to buy still further time, the diplomatic equivalent of “the check is in the mail.” The aid never arrived.

Then came the August 21, 2013 chemical attack that killed around 1,500 Syrian civilians. This time, the administration reacted quickly. Within days it appeared absolutely determined to punish Assad. Any doubts about its resolve were dispelled on August 30, when Secretary of State John Kerry stood before the television cameras and delivered a Churchillian speech justifying immediate missile strikes against the regime. But then, instead of ordering military action, the president decided to seek congressional authorization for the use of force, knowing full well that such a bill had little chance of passing. In short, he punted.

Call it the case of the vanishing reprisal. It is a pattern that reflects the president’s deep aversion toward U.S. involvement in open-ended conflict in the Middle East. His legacy, he has made abundantly clear, is to end such involvement. And just as that dictated doing nothing to stop Assad, it has dictated a posture of complacency toward Iran.

Indeed, the failure—or, better, the refusal—to stand up to Assad in Syria was also a failure to contain the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and their proxy, Hizballah. After all, these two actors did the most to turn the tide of the Syrian civil war. It was their direct intervention that broke the momentum of the insurgency and rescued the Assad regime from destruction.

Here, too, the same pattern is at work. Few have noticed the degree to which, in dealing with Iran’s aggressive behavior in the Middle East, Obama has broken ranks with his predecessors in the White House. For the last 35 years, every other American president has defined countering Iran’s malign influence as a vital American interest. To be sure, Obama still pays lip service to this traditional policy. “We are clear-eyed about Iran’s support for terrorist organizations like Hizballah, which threaten our allies,” he assured us again in this year’s State of the Union address. But the gap between word and deed has been glaring.

Recently, Obama went so far as to envision Iran as a constructive force in regional security. “[I]f we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion,” he told David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, “you could see an equilibrium developing between . . . [Sunni] Gulf states and [Shiite] Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.”

In poker terms, this would be known as a “tell,” a behavioral tic that inadvertently reveals a player’s bluff. In the case of Iran, as in the case of Syria, the president is looking for an exit.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the nuclear negotiations with Tehran that resulted in the interim deal reached in Geneva in November. Even strong supporters of the president’s policy are now publicly expressing doubts about that deal. Thus, Fareed Zakaria, the former managing editor of Foreign Affairs and former editor of Newsweek International, came away flabbergasted from an interview that he conducted for CNN with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. So impressed was Zakaria by the yawning gulf between the American and the Iranian positions that he called the interim deal “a train wreck.”

Even more startling is the skepticism of Dennis Ross, who, until late 2011, was a senior official in the Obama White House with responsibility for the greater Middle East. A study group recently chaired by Ross assessed the interim deal as so “deeply flawed” as to “undermine the effort to prevent a nuclear Iran.”

Obama himself has let it be known that he is not optimistic about the prospects of the next round of negotiations. In his interview with Remnick, he put the chance of success “at less than even.” These are low odds. But does that mean that the president has already worked up a tough Plan B? Is he preparing a response that will leave the Iranians in no doubt that they will be worse off if they fail to satisfy the minimum requirements of the United States and its partners? Or will we witness yet another instance of the vanishing reprisal?

The questions have already answered themselves. The outline of the real Plan B is fully visible in the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) that emerged from Geneva. Technically, that deal lasts six months, but it can be extended indefinitely by mutual consent. While the parties to the agreement express the “aim” of reaching a comprehensive agreement within a year, they are also careful not to commit themselves in any way. The deal, in other words, is less interim than interminable.

Obama’s surrogates are already telling us to expect a very long negotiation. “I think it’s extremely unlikely that it will be possible to reach a comprehensive agreement in the next six months,” says Gary Samore. He ought to know; until last year, he served as the top arms control official in the White House. Samore thus spoke with authority when he concluded: “We’re in for a rolling series of extensions.” In short: endless process, no endpoint.

And consider where we’re already at in this process. Despite claims to the contrary, the JPOA does not “dismantle” any part of the Iranian nuclear program. It pauses some aspects, while others proceed apace. A “research” loophole allows the Iranians to continue work on advanced centrifuges. In short, Iran gets to have it both ways: to enjoy sanctions relief (the West’s part of the deal) while continuing to build up its nuclear program (Iran’s part of the deal).

Much energy on the part of the White House has been invested in painting a contrary picture. We are assured that real progress has been made; we are even told that Iran has embarked on a historic reconciliation with the West. The president, even as he admits to doubts about the prospects of success, deftly encourages exaggerated hopes for the ongoing negotiations in order to seize the moral high ground from skeptics. The White House has even taken to branding its critics as warmongers seeking to sabotage the chances for peace. “If certain members of Congress want the United States to take military action, they should be upfront with the American public and say so,” warned Bernadette Meehan, a White House staffer.

Thus the interim deal allows the president, too, to have it both ways. He makes concrete concessions to Iran in the present while promising get-tough policies in the future—at, that is, some very distant point in the future, which, as it draws nearer, will assuredly vanish in turn like a mirage in the desert.

“As I sat there,” writes former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his new memoir, “I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander [on the ground] . . . , doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.” Gates is describing a White House discussion about Afghanistan. But it might just as well have been about Iran—or, for that matter, Syria. The president doesn’t trust those who have traditionally managed the conflict with Iran, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the struggle to be his. He wants out.

Continuing to profess an unshakable resolve to roll back the Iranian nuclear program, the president has blunted every argument for a tougher policy and found plausible-sounding excuses to resist all calls for increased pressure on Tehran. While denying it vehemently, he has put the United States on a glide path to accepting a nuclear Iran—bluffing all the way.

Authors

Editor's Note: This article by Michael Doran was originally published on Mosaic Magazine under the headline "I Don’t Bluff” on Monday, February 6, 2014.

President Obama has repeatedly promised to do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb. If there is no other choice, he says, he will resort to force. In a March 2012 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, the president famously rejected the alternative policy, namely, allowing Iran to go nuclear and then trying to contain it. He emphasized the point dramatically: “[A]s president of the United States,” he said, “I don’t bluff.”

Really? Suppose this statement was just a show of toughness, timed to keep supporters of Israel on his side during the 2012 campaign season. Suppose that, when it came to Iran, in his heart of hearts, the president actually preferred a strategy of containment to a strategy of prevention. Suppose that was actually his policy aim from the outset—but, for obvious reasons, he couldn’t say so. How would he proceed?

He would proceed exactly as he has been proceeding—trumpeting his intention to roll back the Iranian nuclear program while actually avoiding confrontation at all costs.

To gain a sense of the president’s methods, consider first the saga of Syria’s use of chemical weapons that developed in 2013. Each time the situation called for a tough response, Obama telegraphed a punch—his famous “red line”—but then never actually delivered the blow.

The White House first realized that Bashar al-Assad had employed chemical weapons in the spring of last year. Its immediate reaction, however, was anything but a rush to enforce the president’s announced red line. On the contrary, it stalled for time. When the political pressure to respond became unbearable, the White House announced, in June, an intention to increase aid to the Syrian opposition. The president, it now seemed clear, was going to force Assad to pay a price for his barbarity. But the announcement soon revealed itself as a ploy to buy still further time, the diplomatic equivalent of “the check is in the mail.” The aid never arrived.

Then came the August 21, 2013 chemical attack that killed around 1,500 Syrian civilians. This time, the administration reacted quickly. Within days it appeared absolutely determined to punish Assad. Any doubts about its resolve were dispelled on August 30, when Secretary of State John Kerry stood before the television cameras and delivered a Churchillian speech justifying immediate missile strikes against the regime. But then, instead of ordering military action, the president decided to seek congressional authorization for the use of force, knowing full well that such a bill had little chance of passing. In short, he punted.

Call it the case of the vanishing reprisal. It is a pattern that reflects the president’s deep aversion toward U.S. involvement in open-ended conflict in the Middle East. His legacy, he has made abundantly clear, is to end such involvement. And just as that dictated doing nothing to stop Assad, it has dictated a posture of complacency toward Iran.

Indeed, the failure—or, better, the refusal—to stand up to Assad in Syria was also a failure to contain the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and their proxy, Hizballah. After all, these two actors did the most to turn the tide of the Syrian civil war. It was their direct intervention that broke the momentum of the insurgency and rescued the Assad regime from destruction.

Here, too, the same pattern is at work. Few have noticed the degree to which, in dealing with Iran’s aggressive behavior in the Middle East, Obama has broken ranks with his predecessors in the White House. For the last 35 years, every other American president has defined countering Iran’s malign influence as a vital American interest. To be sure, Obama still pays lip service to this traditional policy. “We are clear-eyed about Iran’s support for terrorist organizations like Hizballah, which threaten our allies,” he assured us again in this year’s State of the Union address. But the gap between word and deed has been glaring.

Recently, Obama went so far as to envision Iran as a constructive force in regional security. “[I]f we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion,” he told David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, “you could see an equilibrium developing between . . . [Sunni] Gulf states and [Shiite] Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.”

In poker terms, this would be known as a “tell,” a behavioral tic that inadvertently reveals a player’s bluff. In the case of Iran, as in the case of Syria, the president is looking for an exit.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the nuclear negotiations with Tehran that resulted in the interim deal reached in Geneva in November. Even strong supporters of the president’s policy are now publicly expressing doubts about that deal. Thus, Fareed Zakaria, the former managing editor of Foreign Affairs and former editor of Newsweek International, came away flabbergasted from an interview that he conducted for CNN with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. So impressed was Zakaria by the yawning gulf between the American and the Iranian positions that he called the interim deal “a train wreck.”

Even more startling is the skepticism of Dennis Ross, who, until late 2011, was a senior official in the Obama White House with responsibility for the greater Middle East. A study group recently chaired by Ross assessed the interim deal as so “deeply flawed” as to “undermine the effort to prevent a nuclear Iran.”

Obama himself has let it be known that he is not optimistic about the prospects of the next round of negotiations. In his interview with Remnick, he put the chance of success “at less than even.” These are low odds. But does that mean that the president has already worked up a tough Plan B? Is he preparing a response that will leave the Iranians in no doubt that they will be worse off if they fail to satisfy the minimum requirements of the United States and its partners? Or will we witness yet another instance of the vanishing reprisal?

The questions have already answered themselves. The outline of the real Plan B is fully visible in the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) that emerged from Geneva. Technically, that deal lasts six months, but it can be extended indefinitely by mutual consent. While the parties to the agreement express the “aim” of reaching a comprehensive agreement within a year, they are also careful not to commit themselves in any way. The deal, in other words, is less interim than interminable.

Obama’s surrogates are already telling us to expect a very long negotiation. “I think it’s extremely unlikely that it will be possible to reach a comprehensive agreement in the next six months,” says Gary Samore. He ought to know; until last year, he served as the top arms control official in the White House. Samore thus spoke with authority when he concluded: “We’re in for a rolling series of extensions.” In short: endless process, no endpoint.

And consider where we’re already at in this process. Despite claims to the contrary, the JPOA does not “dismantle” any part of the Iranian nuclear program. It pauses some aspects, while others proceed apace. A “research” loophole allows the Iranians to continue work on advanced centrifuges. In short, Iran gets to have it both ways: to enjoy sanctions relief (the West’s part of the deal) while continuing to build up its nuclear program (Iran’s part of the deal).

Much energy on the part of the White House has been invested in painting a contrary picture. We are assured that real progress has been made; we are even told that Iran has embarked on a historic reconciliation with the West. The president, even as he admits to doubts about the prospects of success, deftly encourages exaggerated hopes for the ongoing negotiations in order to seize the moral high ground from skeptics. The White House has even taken to branding its critics as warmongers seeking to sabotage the chances for peace. “If certain members of Congress want the United States to take military action, they should be upfront with the American public and say so,” warned Bernadette Meehan, a White House staffer.

Thus the interim deal allows the president, too, to have it both ways. He makes concrete concessions to Iran in the present while promising get-tough policies in the future—at, that is, some very distant point in the future, which, as it draws nearer, will assuredly vanish in turn like a mirage in the desert.

“As I sat there,” writes former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his new memoir, “I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander [on the ground] . . . , doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.” Gates is describing a White House discussion about Afghanistan. But it might just as well have been about Iran—or, for that matter, Syria. The president doesn’t trust those who have traditionally managed the conflict with Iran, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the struggle to be his. He wants out.

Continuing to profess an unshakable resolve to roll back the Iranian nuclear program, the president has blunted every argument for a tougher policy and found plausible-sounding excuses to resist all calls for increased pressure on Tehran. While denying it vehemently, he has put the United States on a glide path to accepting a nuclear Iran—bluffing all the way.

Event Information

The nearly three year old civil war in Syria shows no sign of slowing, despite the start of official talks between the Syrian government and opposition forces. Over 100,000 Syrians have died, and millions are internally displaced or have become refugees. The conflict is also destabilizing the neighborhood, with terrorism and civil strife surging in neighboring Iraq and Lebanon and radical voices becoming stronger throughout the region. Can Syria’s neighbors avoid civil wars of their own? Is the United States doing enough to reduce the risk of a broader conflagration?

On February 6, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings examined the rising tension and violence kindled by the Syrian war and offered recommendations on what the United States can do to counteract these trends. Panelists included Brookings Fellow Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center, who participated via videoconference from Doha; Senior Fellow Kenneth M. Pollack; and Roger Hertog Senior Fellow Michael Doran. Brookings Senior Fellow Michael O’Hanlon, director of research for Foreign Policy, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

Event Information

The nearly three year old civil war in Syria shows no sign of slowing, despite the start of official talks between the Syrian government and opposition forces. Over 100,000 Syrians have died, and millions are internally displaced or have become refugees. The conflict is also destabilizing the neighborhood, with terrorism and civil strife surging in neighboring Iraq and Lebanon and radical voices becoming stronger throughout the region. Can Syria’s neighbors avoid civil wars of their own? Is the United States doing enough to reduce the risk of a broader conflagration?

On February 6, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings examined the rising tension and violence kindled by the Syrian war and offered recommendations on what the United States can do to counteract these trends. Panelists included Brookings Fellow Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center, who participated via videoconference from Doha; Senior Fellow Kenneth M. Pollack; and Roger Hertog Senior Fellow Michael Doran. Brookings Senior Fellow Michael O’Hanlon, director of research for Foreign Policy, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.